What does it take to heal while you’re still surrounded by the descendants of those who committed a century-old communal betrayal? The vibrant, thriving Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma had set up an economy so strong and affluent that it was called Black Wall Street. That was until it posed a threat to the white population who, in an act of racialized vengeance a century ago, left the streets strewn with charred rubble and the bodies of its African American residents.
Just an hour west and beginning around the same time, a sinister darkness had cast its shadow over Osage County and the Osage tribe whose members became among the country’s wealthiest citizens when land they were assigned turned out to have vast pockets of oil. White locals and outsiders attached themselves to the tribe’s members looking for ways to steal the tribe’s wealth.
The federal government kept coming up with laws that helped separate Native Americans from their land, and the government appointed and paid local lawyers and businessmen to act as “guardians” who played gatekeeper and scrutinize the flow of money that rightfully belonged to tribe members on the grounds they would otherwise squander their fortunes. Many of the Osage were regarded as “incompetent” and had to justify their needs before receiving money that was their share of lease payments from oil companies.
Many Osage sold the land but, due to a smartly-negotiated agreement overseen by Osage Principal Chief James Bigheart and a half-Native lawyer named John Palmer, the nation negotiated a deal with the U.S. government wherein every full-blood Osage retained their headrights on any mineral and oil deposits within the reservation. What’s more, those headrights – which afforded quarterly distributions from the Osage Mineral Estate – could not be sold, only passed down through family.
Shortly thereafter, numerous tribe members began turning up dead in what became known as the “Reign of Terror.” Some Osage were shot, others appeared to be poisoned or died after their cars were run off the road. One died in a mysterious explosion.
Conveniently, their headrights reverted to white spouses who became the new recipients of those quarterly distributions. Some of the land fell under the control of lawyers and the guardians appointed and paid by the government to control the dispersal of funds. The Osage deaths were often misidentified by morticians as a result of laziness and/or corruption. Estimates are that as many as 60 Osage members and possibly many more might have been murdered. It’s impossible to say because of the questionable cause of death rulings that helped perpetrators escape scrutiny.
The Movie
For decades, this story of systemic racism and theft was mostly known only among members of the tribe. It only caught Hollywood’s attention when galleys of the David Grann book Killers of the Flower Moon: An American Crime and the Birth of the FBI got circulated to studios and producers in 2016. The book is a blueprint for a historical justice procedural about how J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling law-enforcement bureau dispatched a team headed by a stoic former Texas Ranger named Tom White to solve the case. Bidding on the book quickly reached seven figures.
Those offers came with alignments ranging from Leonardo DiCaprio to George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Upstart company Imperative Entertainment blew others out of the water with a $5 million statement-making bid, and it soon signed Oscar winner Eric Roth to adapt. Paramount came in along with DiCaprio and Scorsese — both had deals at that studio — and suddenly there was the prospect of Scorsese pairing his favorite lead actors, DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
Scorsese told Deadline last May that the course of the project was upended when he, DiCaprio and De Niro grew uncomfortable telling a “white savior” law-and-order story that had been a staple of Westerns for decades. After all, the crimes were largely ignored by local law enforcement and Hoover’s men only got involved when the desperate tribe paid about $20,000 of its money to get the government to investigate the killings.
The filmmakers instead leaned into the marriage between Ernest and Mollie Burkhart. He was a supporting player in Grann’s book who was arrested for allegedly mixing poison in the insulin he was injecting into his diabetic Osage wife, who was wasting away by the time the feds came to Oklahoma. DiCaprio and Scorsese liked the conflict faced by Burkhart, who in their telling loves his wife but still does what he is told by his uncle, William Hale (De Niro), a cattle baron who had gained the trust of Osage locals. Hale was eventually convicted of systematically bumping tribe members off to collect their headright annuity payments.
Cowed by that creative shift and a $200 million budget, Paramount dropped out and Apple stepped up, and then brought Paramount back to handle the global theatrical release. The film will end up on Apple TV+ in the heart of awards season.
The film drew extravagant reviews and a long standing ovation at its Cannes premiere, and Friday, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called Killers of the Flower Moon an “unsettling masterpiece,” a reckoning of the depths greed and entitlement can drive men toward, particularly towards a group they looked down on with resentment and jealousy. Aside from the work of Scorsese, DiCaprio and De Niro, critics in particular have hailed Lily Gladstone’s breakout turn as Mollie, the film’s emotional center, whose expressive eyes hover over the proceedings as she tries to process the idea that the man she loves, the father of her children, could be slowly killing her.
Gladstone has a chance to make history as the first Native American woman to take the stage at the Oscars. Technically, a woman known as Sacheen Littlefeather stepped to the Oscar podium, but that was to refuse Marlon Brando’s Best Actor trophy for The Godfather, to protest Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans onscreen. While it was later revealed she might not have actually been a real Native American after telling the shocked and somewhat hostile Hollywood crowd she was an Apache, Littlefeather and Brando were hardly wrong in their assessment of a film genre where white performers were routinely painted to play Native Americans, who were usually depicted as savages and villains.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a decided leap in the right direction in the onscreen depiction of Native Americans – numerous Osage appear in the movie; tribal leaders and consultants were brought into the fold; and the score was done by the late Robbie Robertson, the longtime Scorsese collaborator who was the son of a Cayuga and Mohawk mother and lived on the Six Nations Reserve in Canada southwest of Toronto. While she has been silenced from speaking about the movie by the SAG-AFTRA strike – one of her only interviews on the subject came with Deadline before the stoppage – Gladstone will compete in the Lead Actress Oscar category and seems poised for a considerable acting career in Hollywood.
RELATED: Meet Lily Gladstone, The Breakout Star Of ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ And An Early Oscar Contender
Shedding A Light
Aside from Gladstone’s chance to make history, what will the surviving members of the Osage community get for having their tragedy laid bare for the world? For one thing, the run-up to the film has focused attention on the volume of headrights and land not under the control of Osage descendants, and it seems likely that as the movie gets widely seen, many of these white landholders will have some explaining to do. The owners range from churches to oil companies, banks, the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma, and, curiously, the family of the husband of Ree Drummond, the popular Food Network host who has built The Pioneer Woman lifestyle brand based on her resettlement in Oklahoma when she married Ladd Drummond, who along with Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond owns about 9% of land that once belonged to members of the Osage tribe.
A lot of this was unearthed in reporting done by Bloomberg’s Rachel Adams-Heard in a multi-episode podcast following a lawsuit that forced the government to disclose who owned headrights and land in Osage County. A new Vanity Fair feature leaned in on the holdings held by the Drummonds. After nearly 100 years, lands have changed hands and been passed down through generations; it may prove very difficult for the Osage to simply claw back land. But the Osage Nation has used its financial resources to buy land, press federal legislation to bring more land back in the fold and make it easier for those who want to give holdings back to the tribe. The Osage raise livestock on the land they’ve reacquired, as leaders try to ensure that traditions like the Osage language are preserved for generations to come.
“I cannot speak for the government, but what I can say is there will be questions after the movie’s release about how this land and this money left our hands,” said Everett Walker, who is chairman of the Osage Minerals Council. “Everyone will be trying to get rid of the headrights of it, because they don’t want reporters tracking who they are and revealing their identities.”
His hope that the attention from the movie will move the federal government to recognize its legal and moral obligation to enact laws that work for the benefit of the Osage Nation.
“We had to take the government to court to find out where the headrights have gone,” Walker says. “Why? The Osage has been under scrutiny since we left Missouri and got to Oklahoma in 1872,” he says. “One thing the film doesn’t show is whether the headrights were taken by hook or crook. Some were given in good faith.”
Unfortunately, bureaucracy remains when it comes to finding out who still holds headrights. Explains Waller: “There are so many red-tape variables in getting our land back, and those who want to give it have to go through the government process. There are entities that have tried to give back headrights, but again the governmental process makes it difficult.”
He continued, “I have sat in rooms with these people who tell me they are trying to protect me, while I have to advocate for my people to get our land back from the same people I sit in these meetings with. We will have to fix that. We want a route where the federal government has no say in what we do with our land and how we get it back. We want to cut ourselves away from the federal dollar and use what belongs to us how we see fit.”
Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear is also glad to see the atrocities the Osage Nation have experienced being exposed. In school, students learn surface-level topics concerning Indigenous tribes in America, but not this. He said, “Kids always learn about Custer’s Last Stand, or Wounded Knee, but never about what happened to us. I think this film will change that and hopefully propel others to learn more about us.” He wants outsiders to understand that the Osage’s past of state-sanctioned violence needs to be permanently etched into the fabric of American history.
“With the participation of consultants, artisans, language teachers and historians, there was a community healing, happening by being able to be a part of telling our own story,” he said.
Kids always learn about Custer’s Last Stand, or Wounded Knee, but never about what happened to us. I think this film will change that and hopefully propel others to learn more.
Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear
Despite the constant hurdles the Osage Nation has experienced, it has made many strides towards gaining back land and mineral rights. As told in the Osage Nation Sesquicentennial Celebration yearbook, 2016 was the year the nation made a landmark move by acquiring Ted Turner’s expansive 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch. This monumental purchase, not only significant in size, gave the Osage a golden chance to reclaim a significant portion of their ancestral land. The purchase was essential for their food sovereignty programs, as the land is primed for hunting and grazing.
In 2022, Osage Nation Real Estate Services managed over 137,000 acres of land within the Osage Reservation, owned by both individual Osages and the Osage Nation. The nation has now set its sights on a historic feat: transferring the 43,000 acres from Osage Nation Ranch into a trust. Achieving this would mark the biggest free-to-trust land acquisition in U.S. history, highlighting the nation’s ongoing commitment to strategic land expansion.
Complications arise when non-Osage want to give the land back, however. Non-members hold 26 percent of headright interest in the Osage mineral estate. In November 2021, the Osage Nation Minerals Council pushed federal legislation where non-Osage can gift or sell their interests back to the nation, Osage Minerals Council, or individual Osage members. However, due to existing legal constraints, non-Osages have been resorting to a federal tiered system for transferring these interests for over 20 years due to the barriers federal law has created for those who may want to return those rights.