Cultural Appropriation and Exploitation of Indigenous Traditions in Badlands

Douglas Preston’s 2025 thriller Badlands, the fifth Nora Kelly novel, opens with a nameless woman dying alone in the desert and spirals into a conspiracy rooted in stolen indigenous knowledge. At its core, the novel levels a sustained critique of cultural appropriation—the act of taking sacred rituals, symbols, and objects from their originating cultures without permission, understanding, or respect—and its inevitable slide into exploitation for power, profit, and control. The thematic claim the novel makes is unambiguous: when sacred traditions are severed from their cultural context and repurposed by outsiders, they become instruments of harm, hollowing out the very meaning they once held while enabling new forms of violence and manipulation.

This theme unfolds across multiple layers of the narrative. The cult that drives the plot did not arise organically from indigenous practice; it was constructed by a figure named Oskarbi, who stole Totonteac peyote ceremonies and fused them with invented Gallina witchcraft rituals. The result is a Frankenstein’s monster of appropriated spirituality—a system designed not for healing or community but for enslavement. Through the evidence Corrie Swanson and Nora Kelly uncover, the novel traces how sacred knowledge, once commodified, loses its power to heal and gains only the power to destroy.

The Architecture of Appropriation: Oskarbi’s Cult

The cult at the heart of Badlands is built on a foundation of stolen rituals. The page-specific requirements for this analysis identify Oskarbi’s theft of Totonteac peyote rituals as a central example of cultural theft. Peyote ceremonies, sacred to the Huichol (Wixárika) people and other indigenous groups in Mexico, involve the ritual consumption of the peyote cactus to facilitate spiritual visions and healing. In the novel, these ceremonies have been stripped of their original framework and grafted onto a darker, invented tradition—the fictional Gallina witchcraft that the authors note is “our own invention” (Authors’ Note, Chapter 66).

Skip Kelly, held captive by the cult, provides the most explicit diagnosis of their hypocrisy. In Chapter 56, he shouts at his captors: “You people are a bunch of poseurs… Wannabe jerkoffs playing Indian with stone knives and fake rituals, supposedly divining the wisdom of the ancients—but modern conveniences like flashlights and guns are okay, is that it?” Skip’s outburst crystallizes the selective nature of their appropriation. The cult embraces the aesthetics of indigenous ceremony—stone knives, red clay body paint, feathered masks, rhythmic circling—while discarding the moral and communal frameworks that gave those forms meaning. They are, as Skip insists, performers rather than practitioners.

This is not a fringe detail but the organizing principle of the cult. Its authority figure, Oskarbi, imported a foreign spiritual practice, fused it with fabricated archaeological narratives about the long-vanished Gallina people, and deployed the resulting hybrid to attract and manipulate followers. By Chapter 29, Nora Kelly has pieced together evidence that the cult’s rituals have escalated to “human sacrifice. Today.” What began as cultural theft has become a machine for murder.

Theft of Sacred Objects: Edison Nash and the Prasiolite Stones

A parallel thread of the theme emerges through Edison Nash, whose theft of Gallina artifacts illustrates how cultural exploitation operates at an individual, apparently casual level. In Chapter 34, around a campfire, Edison admits to Skip Kelly that he has stolen several items from the ruins: an obsidian axe, an effigy pot, a stone pipe, a child’s yucca sandal, and—critically—a pair of prasiolite lightning stones. He displays them with the pride of a collector, lubricated by expensive reposado tequila and a self-aggrandizing narrative about the Gallina genocide.

Edison’s theft operates on the same spectrum as Oskarbi’s larger-scale appropriation. Both men treat indigenous cultural material as a resource to be extracted—whether spiritual ceremonies or physical artifacts—without accountability to the cultures of origin. The prasiolite lightning stones are not mere trinkets; they carry ritual significance the cult later leverages. When Nora descends into the kiva in Chapter 56, she sees a large pottery bowl “brimming with prasiolite lightning stones,” evidence of how stolen objects have been recontextualized into the cult’s invented ceremonial framework.

The cult’s punishment of Edison is savage—he is flayed alive in Chapter 43—but it is not justice. The cult does not return the stolen items to any legitimate indigenous authority; it reclaims them for its own use. The handler calls Edison a “thief” and “desecrator,” yet the accusers are themselves thieves and desecrators on a grander scale. This irony exposes a core mechanism of exploitation: those who steal sacred knowledge or objects often reserve the right to punish others for the same offense, not out of respect for the culture but to maintain a monopoly on the appropriated power.

Authentic Voices and the Cost of Distortion

Against the cult’s fabricated spirituality, the novel positions authentic indigenous voices who illustrate what genuine tradition looks like—and what is lost when it is distorted. The most fully realized of these is Jack Bia, introduced in Chapter 22, a young Navajo man studying to become a medicine man. His conversation with Corrie Swanson and Detective Sergeant Benally offers a window into Navajo epistemology that stands in stark contrast to the cult’s theatrical rituals.

When Corrie asks about the black rock formation where a body was found, Bia reluctantly shares the story of the Noqoìlpi—the Great Gambler—a figure from Navajo creation narrative who “misused the ceremonies in order to control and enslave the people.” The Great Gambler won everything in gambling games, ruled through corrupted ceremony, and was ultimately shot into the sky by Darkness. Bia explains that the ruins of Chaco Canyon and similar sites are left “as a warning about arrogance and the misuse of power.” The parallel to the novel’s cult could hardly be more explicit: Oskarbi and Dr. Morgan Bromley are contemporary Great Gamblers, using stolen ceremonies to enslave and coerce.

Bia’s account of the Enemy Way ceremony further illuminates the gap between authentic practice and appropriation. The Enemy Way, he explains, is a multi-night ceremony with sand paintings, chanting, and a battle reenactment designed to cure veterans of the spiritual taint of war—what Western psychology calls PTSD. Benally adds, “Your culture calls those ghosts PTSD.” This reframing is not an act of appropriation but one of translation across worldviews, grounded in community, lineage, and genuine belief. The cult, by contrast, has no community to answer to, no elders to transmit knowledge, and no cosmology beyond the lust for power.

An unnamed elderly Navajo woman in Chapter 11 provides another register of authentic response. When shown a photo of the victim, she identifies the black rock formation as “a place of yee naaldlooshii”—skinwalkers, Navajo witches—and adds, “I never go there. It’s been that way since the beginning of time.” Her fear is not performative; it is woven into a lifelong relationship with the land. She and Bia both understand that certain places and practices carry real spiritual weight—a weight the cult treats as raw material for manipulation.

Bromley and the Bureaucratic Face of Exploitation

Dr. Morgan Bromley, revealed in Chapter 56 as the cult’s leader after Oskarbi’s death, embodies the theme’s twenty-first-century dimension. He is not an outsider from a foreign country but a credentialed academic—a “slope-shouldered” professor, as Skip puts it. His access to archaeological knowledge, institutional authority, and scientific language gives him cover to pursue what is essentially a project of cultural theft escalated to ritual murder.

The cult’s relationship to technology betrays its appropriative nature. Despite affecting the trappings of ancient practice—the kiva, the masks, the red clay, the stone knives—its members use Mag flashlights, headlamps, revolvers, and binoculars. Skip’s mockery in Chapter 56 targets precisely this contradiction: “modern conveniences like flashlights and guns are okay, is that it?” The cult cherry-picks indigenous aesthetics while retaining every advantage of modernity, a pattern that mirrors real-world exploitation of indigenous traditions by New Age movements and corporate interests.

Bromley’s threat to Nora and Corrie before their planned execution reveals the endgame of cultural appropriation: total control through fear. He promises “a demonstration of power so incredible that—though you witness it with your own eyes—you will not believe it.” The appropriated rituals have become a mechanism for terror, their original meanings so thoroughly erased that only violence remains.

Complexity and Contradiction

No analysis of this theme in Badlands can ignore a significant complication: the authors themselves invented the Gallina witchcraft tradition that the cult exploits. In the Authors’ Note (Chapter 66), Preston and Child write: “The idea that the Gallina engaged in witchcraft and dark practices is our own invention.” The Gallina people were real, and their extinction through genocidal violence is historically documented, but the specific rituals, the cult figures of Oskarbi, Don Benicio, and Bromley, and the associated ceremonies are all “entirely creatures of our imaginations.”

This raises a difficult question: does the novel itself participate in the appropriation it critiques? The authors attempt to navigate this tension by acknowledging the invention openly and emphasizing that “at all times, we have approached this subject with the greatest respect.” They also explicitly note that no present-day Pueblo tribe claims Gallina ancestry and that the term “Anasazi” has been retired in favor of “Ancestral Puebloans.” Whether this disclaimer fully resolves the contradiction is a matter readers must judge for themselves, but the novel’s self-awareness at least opens the question rather than ignoring it.

A further complexity lies in the relationship between indigenous and academic knowledge systems. Nora Kelly, an archaeologist, and Corrie Swanson, an FBI agent, are both outsiders investigating crimes on indigenous land. The novel portrays them as respectful—Nora attempts to speak Navajo (albeit badly, to the old woman’s amusement), and Corrie defers to Benally’s jurisdiction—but their very presence as federal authority figures in the Checkerboard region carries colonial overtones. Sharp’s explanation in Chapter 3 that the Checkerboard resulted from “land appropriation” acknowledges this history without resolving it, and the novel arguably benefits from the same checkerboard of jurisdictions that enables the fracking leases Jack Bia describes: “I don’t see a dime of it. It’s not my land—I just have the grazing rights.”

Conclusion

Badlands uses the framework of a thriller to mount a sustained examination of how indigenous traditions are stolen, distorted, and exploited. From Oskarbi’s theft of Totonteac peyote rituals to Edison Nash’s casual looting of prasiolite stones, from Bromley’s academic cover to the cult’s selective embrace and rejection of modernity, the novel traces the many forms cultural appropriation can take. It poses a clear warning, echoed in Jack Bia’s story of the Great Gambler: ceremonies misused for power and control leave ruin in their wake. The question the novel leaves open—perhaps intentionally—is whether the storyteller can excavate that ruin without becoming part of the problem.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Oskarbi’s appropriation of Totonteac peyote rituals exemplify cultural exploitation in the novel?

Oskarbi took peyote ceremonies sacred to the Huichol people, stripped them of their original spiritual and communal framework, and fused them with a fictionalized version of Gallina witchcraft. Rather than seeking healing or community, he used the resulting hybrid to attract followers, build a cult, and ultimately enable human sacrifice. This trajectory—from stolen ritual to institutionalized violence—illustrates how appropriated traditions lose their original meaning and become tools of control.

2. In what way does Edison Nash’s theft of artifacts parallel the cult’s larger-scale appropriation?

Edison’s theft of the obsidian axe, effigy pot, and prasiolite lightning stones treats indigenous cultural material as a resource to be extracted for personal gratification. The cult later punishes him for this theft—not to restore the objects to their rightful context, but to repossess them for its own invented ceremonial system. Both Edison and the cult operate on the logic of extraction, differing only in scale and the authority they claim.

3. How does Jack Bia’s story of the Great Gambler function as an embedded critique of the cult?

Bia explains that the Great Gambler “misused the ceremonies in order to control and enslave the people” and that the ruins of Chaco Canyon stand as “a warning about arrogance and the misuse of power.” This directly mirrors the cult’s trajectory: Oskarbi and Bromley misuse appropriated ceremonies to control and ultimately kill their followers. The story provides an indigenous framework for understanding exactly the kind of spiritual corruption the novel dramatizes.

4. What contradiction does Skip Kelly expose when he mocks the cult’s use of “modern conveniences like flashlights and guns”?

Skip’s mockery reveals the selective nature of the cult’s appropriation. They embrace the aesthetics of ancient indigenous practice—stone knives, masks, body paint, ritual dance—but retain every advantage of modern technology. This contradiction exposes the cult’s performance as inauthentic: they are not practitioners of an inherited tradition but consumers who pick and choose elements that serve their need for power while discarding any constraints.

5. How does the Authors’ Note complicate the novel’s critique of cultural appropriation?

The authors openly state that the Gallina witchcraft and the cult figures are “entirely creatures of our imaginations,” which means the novel itself invents and profits from a fictionalized indigenous tradition while simultaneously critiquing the fictional characters who do the same. This self-awareness creates a productive tension: the reader must consider whether the novel transcends appropriation through its critique or remains entangled in the very dynamics it condemns.