Sounding Silence in Sundown Survivance Ecology and John Joseph Mathews’s Bildungsroman April Anson In 2013 a photo of twenty-eight-year-old Amanda Polchies at a Mi’kmaq antifracking protest in New Brunswick, Canada, became iconic as a symbol of Indigenous resistance to industrial extraction. Te image draws power in juxtaposition: Polchies silently lifts a delicate feather before a hard horizon of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whose humanness is lost in the line of force with which they mean to protect the interests of the oil and gas industry. Te disso- nance captured in this photo is disturbing but not unique. Recent images of militarized police blasting water cannons at unarmed wa- ter protectors at Standing Rock in subfreezing temperatures also elicited shock and rage. Anger is justifed. Surprise is not. Te use of excessive violence in the name of extractive industry is altogether foreseeable in the history of US and Canadian settler– Native relations (Brown). Indeed, David Grann’s 2017 work of his- torical nonfction, Killers of the Flower Moon, reveals how settler de- sire for land and resources has always been deadly. Grann narrates the Osage Reign of Terror, a period in the 1920s when the Osage were poisoned, shot, and bombed for their headrights to oil-rich land. 1 Trough Grann’s deft archival scrutiny, Killers of the Flower Moon uncovers complex collusions between settler law enforce- ment, oil-industry tycoons, and white communities that seem ee- rily prescient of the riot-gear-clad police shielding the frontlines of settler capitalism today. Grann’s narrative nonfction details the historical backdrop of Osage writer John Joseph Mathews’s 1934 bildungsroman Sundown. Both Grann and Mathews’s texts regard the Osage Reign of Terror as a gruesome example in a long histo- Copyright © 2019 Western Literature Association