On Documents and the Violence They Contain

The office belongs to neither of them. It belongs to the university, some western history department’s conference room with framed daguerreotypes on the walls and a coffee machine that gurgles like a creek going dry. Dorothy Johnson sits at the end of the table nearest the window, her back very straight, and Oakley Hall has claimed the opposite end, where he’s arranged a stack of books and a yellow legal pad. I sit between them with nothing in front of me but a glass of water and a growing suspicion that I have invited two people to a conversation they would never have attended of their own accord.

“The risk card says story-as-document,” I begin. “So I’m thinking about what kind of document could carry a revisionist western. Something legal, maybe. A deposition, or a series of property records.”

Johnson looks at me with the patience she reserves for people who haven’t earned the right to be impatient. “You’re already making it about the form. What’s the story?”

“Well, that’s what I want to talk about. The combination asks for — the investigative structure of Killers of the Flower Moon, the way the crime is systemic rather than individual. And then the picaresque voice from Little Big Man, someone who’s lived on both sides. But rendered in your style” — I nod toward Johnson — “that spare, unsentimental frontier prose. And your political depth,” I say to Hall.

“Don’t assign me a lane,” Hall says. He takes off his reading glasses and sets them on the legal pad. He has large hands, a novelist’s hands, and they move with a deliberateness that makes me aware of my own fidgeting. “The political depth in Warlock isn’t something I layered on. It’s the ground under the story. Governance is what westerns are about — who gets to decide, who gets to enforce, who gets erased from the record. If you make ‘political depth’ a flavoring, you get a pamphlet with horses.”

Johnson almost smiles. Almost. “He’s right about that. Though I’d put it differently. The politics in my stories come through what people do when they’re afraid. A woman trading her child’s moccasins for a blanket because winter is coming and she’s been taken from her people. That’s political, but the woman doesn’t know it. She’s cold.”

“So the document form,” I say, trying to steer back. “I keep thinking about how the Osage murders were hidden inside legal instruments. Guardianship papers. Marriage certificates. Probate records. The killing happened through bureaucracy.”

Hall leans forward. “Now that’s something. The document as the murder weapon. Not a confession, not a diary — the actual paperwork that accomplished the dispossession. You could build the whole story out of the apparatus.”

“But who’s reading these documents?” Johnson asks. “Who finds them, and why do they matter to that person?”

This stops me. I had been thinking about the documents themselves as the story, and Johnson has put her finger on what’s missing. “I don’t have that yet.”

“You need it.” She picks up her coffee, drinks, sets it down. Her movements are economical in the same way her prose is. “A document without a reader is just paper. There has to be someone holding these pages, and you need to know what it costs them to keep reading.”

Hall nods, grudgingly. “She’s right. Though I’d push it further — the reader of the documents should be implicated. Not innocent. Warlock works because nobody in that town has clean hands. Your document-reader can’t be a modern detective uncovering past sins with righteous clarity. They have to be compromised.”

“What if the documents are being assembled for a legal purpose?” I say. “An allotment case, or a probate dispute. Someone is building a record, and the record reveals something worse than what they were looking for.”

“Don’t make it a mystery,” Johnson says, sharply enough that I sit back. “I’m tired of westerns that turn Native suffering into a puzzle for white people to solve. If there’s an investigation, the investigator shouldn’t be the point.”

“Dorothy—” Hall begins.

“I mean it. Killers of the Flower Moon is a good book, but even Grann couldn’t resist making Tom White into a hero. The FBI rides in. Order is restored. That’s the old story wearing a new hat.”

Hall sets down his pen. “You’re not wrong. But the assignment calls for that investigative structure. How do you use it without repeating the pattern?”

“You let the documents speak for themselves,” Johnson says. “No detective. No framing narrator who contextualizes and explains. Just the documents. Let the reader do the work.”

I feel something shift. “So the story is literally just the documents? Property transfers, depositions, letters, ledger entries — and through the accumulation, the reader sees the systematic theft?”

“Not just theft,” Hall says. “Theft implies there’s a thief. What you need to show is a system where everyone is following the law and people are still dying. That’s what makes Warlock a tragedy — not that the system fails, but that the system works exactly as designed.”

Johnson leans back in her chair and looks out the window. The light coming through is the color of old paper. “I wrote a story once about a woman who was captured by the Crow and lived with them for years. When she comes back to white society, she’s the one who’s foreign. Her own people are the aliens. That’s the gap you need in this story — someone who can see both sides of the paperwork. Who knows what the land means in two languages.”

“Like Jack Crabb,” I say. “The man who lived on both sides.”

“Not like Jack Crabb,” Johnson corrects me. “Crabb is a comic figure. He survives everything and learns nothing. That’s Berger’s genius and his limitation — the picaresque voice that bounces off history instead of being wounded by it. Your voice needs wounds.”

Hall writes something on his legal pad. I can’t read it from here. “What if the voice isn’t a person?” he says after a moment. “What if it’s the documents themselves that have lived on both sides? A ledger that records both Osage names and allotment numbers. A deed that was first a treaty, then a cession, then a sale. The document’s history is the story.”

“That’s too clever,” Johnson says.

“It’s not clever, it’s structural—”

“It’s clever, Oakley. It’s the kind of thing a novelist does when he doesn’t want to write a person. The best stories have a face. A body. Someone who bleeds when the system cuts them.”

I’m watching them disagree and realizing both positions are pulling the story somewhere useful. The documents need human weight. But the document form is the risk card — it’s not optional. “What if I use both? The documents carry the institutional story — the allotments, the transfers, the guardianship appointments. But threaded through them are personal documents. Letters. A diary entry. Maybe testimony from someone who’s trying to tell the truth in a legal proceeding that doesn’t have a category for their truth.”

Neither of them speaks immediately, which I’ve learned to read as something other than disagreement.

“Testimony is interesting,” Johnson says finally. “A person speaking under oath, being asked questions that don’t fit their experience. ‘State your name for the record.’ But which name? The name the government gave you, or the name your mother gave you?”

Hall picks it up. “And the questioner — the person conducting the deposition — their questions reveal as much as the answers. What they think is relevant. What they can’t even conceive of asking.”

“The questions are the colonialism,” I say, and immediately regret how it sounds.

“Don’t make it a thesis,” Hall says, not unkindly. “Let it be a story. The questions are just questions. The reader does the rest.”

Johnson pushes her coffee cup to the side. “Here’s what worries me about the document form. You lose the body. In my stories, you can feel the weather. The cold is real. A woman’s hands crack and bleed from work. When you write in documents, you’re writing from inside the office where the decisions get made, and the office is always warm.”

“So bring the body in through the testimony,” I say. “The witness describes physical things — the land, the seasons, the house they lost. The bureaucratic frame tries to contain it and can’t.”

“The tension between the form and the content,” Hall says. “That’s the risk card working. The legal language trying to process something that legal language was designed to obscure.”

“I had a student once,” Johnson says, and the shift is so abrupt that Hall and I both pause. “Blackfeet boy, came to my journalism class at Montana. He was working on a piece about his grandmother’s allotment. The government had divided the family’s land into individual plots, and his grandmother got a quarter section — 160 acres. By the time he was born, the land had been divided among so many heirs that his family’s share was eleven acres. Not because anyone stole it. Because the inheritance laws treated land like money, something you could subdivide forever, and the land is not money. Land is land. You can’t graze cattle on eleven acres.”

Nobody says anything for a moment.

“That’s the story,” I say.

“No,” Johnson says. “That’s the world the story lives in. Don’t confuse the setting with the story.”

Hall has been writing again. “The fractionated heirship problem. It’s one of the great unfinished crimes of the allotment era. Dawes Act parcels getting divided and redivided until the individual shares are worthless. And then consolidated buyers — white buyers, often — purchase the fragments at pennies on the dollar. Perfectly legal. Every step documented.”

“Every step documented,” I repeat. “That could be the structure. The documents that record each step — the original allotment, the death certificates, the probate proceedings, the heir determinations, the lease agreements, the eventual sale. Each document looks reasonable in isolation. Together, they describe an extinction.”

“Now you’re getting somewhere,” Hall says.

“But I still don’t know who’s reading these documents,” Johnson reminds me. “Who’s holding the file?”

“Maybe nobody is. Maybe the documents are just there, in sequence, and the reader is the first person to see the whole file in order.”

Johnson considers this. I can tell she doesn’t like it, but she’s not dismissing it either. “It’s a risk. No protagonist means no one to care about. You’re asking the reader to care about paper.”

“Not paper. The people on the paper.”

“Those aren’t the same thing. The people on the paper are dead. The paper killed them and then commemorated them in the same stroke.”

Hall laughs — a genuine, surprised sound. “Dorothy, that’s the best sentence anyone has said in this room.”

“It’s not a sentence, it’s a fact. Every deed of cession in the West is simultaneously a death certificate and a birth certificate. The tribe dies, the territory is born. It’s all there in the language.”

I write this down, word for word. This is what I came for — not a plan, but an image so precise it cuts. The paper killed them and then commemorated them in the same stroke. A legal document as both weapon and headstone.

“What about the voice from Little Big Man?” I ask. “The picaresque, the survivor who’s been on both sides. If the documents themselves are the frame, where does that voice come in?”

“In the gaps,” Hall says. “Between the documents. Marginalia. Someone writing in the margins of the official record — literally or figuratively.”

“That’s still too literary,” Johnson says. “If you’re committing to the document form, commit. Don’t wink at the reader through the margins. Let the documents be complete and official and damning, and let the human voice come through in the testimony sections, where someone is speaking under oath and the stenographer is trying to capture what they’re saying and failing.”

We sit with that for a while. Outside the window, the mountains are doing what mountains do in Montana — being indifferent and enormous and making everything else seem negotiable. I realize we haven’t talked about the ending, and that neither of them will bring it up, because neither of them trusts endings. Johnson’s best stories stop rather than conclude. Hall’s Warlock ends with the town still standing and the violence still unresolved.

“One more thing,” I say. “The systemic nature of it. Grann’s book shows that the Osage murders weren’t one conspiracy — they were dozens of separate people all realizing they could get away with it because the system was designed to let them. How do I show that in documents without it becoming a catalogue?”

“You don’t show all of it,” Johnson says. “You show one family. One allotment. One piece of land passing through sixty years of paperwork. That’s enough. If you do it right, the reader will understand that this happened a thousand times.”

“Ten thousand,” Hall says quietly.

Johnson stands up, and I realize the meeting is over, though nothing has been formally concluded. She buttons her coat — she’s been wearing her coat the whole time, as if she never intended to stay long.

“Make it spare,” she tells me. “The documents will want to be voluminous. Don’t let them. Each one should be a stone in a wall.”

Hall is still writing on his legal pad. He doesn’t look up. “And make sure the wall is load-bearing,” he says. “Every stone has to carry weight. If any document is there for atmosphere rather than architecture, cut it.”

I want to ask them both how to end the story, but Johnson is already at the door, and Hall is absorbed in whatever he’s writing, and I realize this is the answer — you don’t end it. The documents don’t end. The allotment process didn’t end. The fractionation didn’t end. Somewhere in Oklahoma and Montana and South Dakota, the paperwork is still accumulating, still doing its slow, lawful work.