Family Viewing: The Osage Nation, the Reign of Terror, and Killers of the Flower Moon

Killers interweaves the Western, film noir, the gangster film, the police procedural, the courtroom drama, and even a bit of horror; however, it jumps between them with often elliptical editing in ways that productively challenge the viewer’s ability fully to connect all the different facts, events, and ramifications, especially the first time through. Equally interwoven are traces of another film entirely, something more like A Pipe for February than Grann’s Killers, a film in which we would experience and understand the story of these years as the Osage participants did and gain something of a Native perspective on the events beyond the static victimhood of a deer caught in the headlights.

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There’s an indelible moment in French documentarist Claude Massot’s 1990 film Nanook Revisited. Most of the film is occupied with debunking the “authentic” Indigenous practices Robert Flaherty had his colonized and modernized Inuit subjects reconstruct for the landmark 1922 faux ethnography Nanook of the North. But there’s one moment in which about 100 inhabitants of the village of Inukjuak in Nunavik, the northernmost part of Quebec, watch a VHS copy of the original Nanook, shot in their village 58 years prior, on an old TV. “That’s my grandfather,” one viewer points out. Another pair discusses whether a young child on their mother’s back is Taiviti or Tamusi. “That one: it’s me,” an elderly woman insists, laughing. I thought of this moment when I first watched Killers of the Flower Moon. This was not only because the film was made in close collaboration with the Osage People whose history it recounted. It was not only because the movie straddles a line between documentary and fiction first delineated (and in the same moment travestied) by Flaherty’s film. It’s because the reign of terror, in which somewhere between 60 and several hundred Osage were murdered for the most part with impunity, was, for members of the Osage Nation as for the Inuit People of Inukjuak, not an abstract past but intimate family history. “The Osage today remember the reign of terror as if it was yesterday,” Comanche documentarist Dan Bigbee Jr. explains of Osage Murders, the 2020 film he made with Oglala Lakota filmmaker Lily Shangreaux. “Each family lost aunts, uncles, grandparents, creating a gap in family histories and tribal culture.”1

Unlike Flaherty, Killers director Martin Scorsese’s documentary production receives far less attention than his fiction films, although his long career has been punctuated by nonfiction, from his editing work on the 1970 concert doc Woodstock through 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue, which knowingly insinuated staged fictions into compelling archival footage. Indeed, according to Scorsese, the original intention of making the film that became Killers dates back over 50 years to a few days he spent on the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Lakota, in the most impoverished county in the U.S., on a film project connected to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s 1970 nonfiction “Indian History of the American West.”2 Looking back, Scorsese recently acknowledged that he had “stayed away from” the topic for nearly half a century, “because the shock was so strong. Somehow it had to be the right story, and that’s taken a long time.”3

Adapting nonfiction books into fiction films has long been part of Scorsese’s filmmaking practice, from Raging Bull to Goodfellas to The Irishman, and the “right story” he eventually found was David Grann’s best-selling true crime history that gave the film its title and a good portion of its script. Much of the $200 million production budget for Killers went to recreating the settings, clothes, and customs of 1920s Osage County.4 And in this sense, like Flaherty for the Inuit of Inukjuak, Scorsese did quite a service for the People at the heart of the film. Whatever one makes of the movie’s plotting and storytelling choices, its images will serve in perpetuity as documentary footage of hundreds of Native actors and Osage actors reclaiming their past by recreating it in the present, with the help of the deep pockets of Apple TV and the directorial clout Scorsese exercised in refusing to move the production off location to Apple’s preference, New Mexico.5

That Killers is framed explicitly as a settler colonialist outsider telling of the Osage story in which the filmmaker is himself implicated is the movie’s greatest strength as well as the source of its inevitable failure fully to tell that story. Certainly, the capacious duration of its 206 minutes creates ample space for reflecting on the ways we choose to tell history and to whom those choices are more or less available. Grann’s admirable book, for instance, does far better than Scorsese’s film in capturing the extent of the legal and extralegal violence waged against the Osage and in showing how far into the past and up into the present that violence and its ramifications extend. With a very few notable exceptions, Scorsese’s film chooses to zoom in with laser precision on a few core years in the 1920s when the serial murder of Osage for the headrights to the oil beneath their Oklahoma reservation was at its most sensationalized and publicized extreme. This makes good Hollywood filmmaking sense – as Aristotle long ago told us, unity of time, place, and action are essential for tragic theater, and Scorsese’s version of Killers is nothing if not a classical tragedy seeking an emotional catharsis through the emotions of pity and fear.

It is also, as Scorsese’s extradiegetic introduction to the film emphasizes, a morality play that will edify and perhaps shame its implicitly white, non-Native audience about the tragedy of its own history.6 That introduction, with the director seated in a chair facing the audience and stressing “the authentic way” in which they have told “this powerful historical story,” is mirrored by the film’s coda, where Scorsese returns, this time within the diegesis, to read an obituary at the end of a radio dramatization that has ignored or distorted many of the facts in the service of a different kind of tale. As many reviewers have noted, the coda implicates both the filmmaker and his audience in the movie’s violence and its inevitable outsider distortions in the representation of that violence. Insomuch as legal policy; federal, local, and state oversight; and federal, local, and state corruption initiated, enabled, and perpetuated this violence, all American citizens are indeed implicated in the tragedy we have just watched.

At the same time, both the introduction and the coda work to distance viewers from those same events and that same complicity, to position it as a “historical story” rather than as an ongoing process. The introduction placates the viewer with the catharsis of pity and fear in the face of tragic events in a past that is shown to be securely past. And the coda displaces attention from the ways those events are woven into the history of the U.S. from its inception through to the present and onto the flawed forms at our disposal for understanding a singularly awful moment in our past. Within those constraints, it’s a brilliant film. When we step outside of them, its deficiencies and limitations become equally glaring.

How We Got There

The story of the Osage and the story of Scorsese’s film are both fraught and contested narratives. A major force in Indian Country, the Osage and their ancestral lands originated in the Ohio River Valley. From early settler colonial days through the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the Osage dominated the territory now occupied by the states of Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, from the Mississippi River into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, with the Osage River running through its heart. They called themselves “Ni-U-Ko¢n-Ska or “Children of the Middle Waters.’”7 Through the 18th century, writes Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen, “the lower Missouri Valley was a thoroughly Indigenous world, ruled by the Osages, [who] had become power brokers between French Louisiana and the Native nations to the west and north, regulating the upriver trade from New Orleans just up to the point where it did not stop altogether.”8 They were, for Ojibwe writer David Treuer, “a force to be reckoned with,” their “resistance” through the 19th century a series of skillful negotiations from whatever leverage they could find, both in their territorial strength and in the wrinkles of American law and treaties, even as they were constantly pushed westward, constrained, and betrayed by them.9

Grann begins his history here, when Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase from the French removed the Osage’s primary trading partner and counterweight to British and American expansion, and they were “forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas.”10 Osage writer and journalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr. notes that “The United States paid less per acre for Osage land than the Dutch had paid two hundred years earlier for Manhattan Island.”11 As their territory was reduced, so were the Osage People, by disease and by warfare with other Indians, from 17,000 in the 18th century to 3,000 during their last days on the Kansas reservation in the 1860s, beleaguered by non-Indian squatters, including the family of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder.12 A brief and unusual window in which the newly appointed Commissioner of Indian affairs, a Quaker, negotiated an unprecedented treaty paying $1.26 per acre and granting permission to use the payment directly toward the purchase of their own reservation, led to the Osage acquiring a small parcel of their ancestral hunting lands in what was then Indian Territory and would soon become the northeastern corner of Oklahoma. According to early 20th-century writer John Joseph Mathews, who was one-eighth Osage, they chose the hill country because it was inaccessible to railroads, unfarmable, and thus, they believed, unlikely ever to be coveted by white settlers.13

Because of the cash payment for their land, so “generous” it led to a shakeup in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Osage had technically become the wealthiest tribe in North America. But because the remaining money was not under their direct control and was disbursed sparingly if at all by the BIA, they were also starving, unable to farm, hunt, or otherwise support themselves on the barren reservation. It was at this point that the Osage discovered oil under their land, a fact they did not disclose while negotiating the forced allotment of the reservation into individual plots, meant to discourage collective living and encourage assimilation into private property and other core American values. The last Nation to give in to allotment, the Osage were able to preserve collective ownership of the rights beneath the allotments, which was known as the “underground reservation” and which would soon become some of the most valuable real estate in the world.14

Each allotment owner was granted “headrights” to their land, one headright for each of the 2,229 surviving enrolled Osage Indians in 1906.15 Each headright produced yearly dividends from oil companies and investors digging for oil or exploiting existing wells. “In 1923 alone,” Grann writes, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.”16 “The Osage,” as the Native-produced documentary Osage Murders laconically puts it, “enjoyed their money.” As Osage interviewee Marvin Stepson summed up both acidly and admiringly in 2020, “No, they didn’t need to kill us for our money. If they’d have hung around long enough, we’d have given it to ’em. We do that today.”17 The authorities did not approve of this behavior and established a guardianship structure intended to control Osage expenditures of their money. Headright possessors who were deemed white or less than one-half Osage were generally declared “competent” and exempted from guardianship; half- to fullblood Osage nearly always were not.

Most of the reign of terror simply consisted of white guardians – lawyers, officials, ranchers, and other local authorities – leaching off enormous sums of Osage money through a vast and efficient system of kickbacks, inflated rates, and made-up fees and charges. The violence came from when their wards resisted or even greedier and more opportunistic criminals pursued headrights directly rather than taking a cut through guardianship. Headrights were hereditary and could be inherited by non-Osage who married into Osage families. And inheritance could be expedited. Poisoning was the most common means of eliminating an Osage wife or ward, which could be easily dismissed as alcohol-related by coroners and doctors on the take. But some of the murders were more spectacular; Grann’s book and Scorsese’s movie are concerned with the most publicized of these: the murder by Ernest Burkhart, his uncle William “King” Hale, and their associates of Mollie Burkhart’s mother, three sisters, and another eight individuals; their attempted murder of Mollie with poisoned diabetes injections; and their arrest, trial, and conviction led by Tom White, a former Texas Ranger and detective under J. Edgar Hoover in the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation.

For Grann and especially Scorsese, Hale and Burkhart are the dark heart of American violence against Indians. Theirs are far and away the highest-profile accounts of this history, but by no means the first. McAuliffe’s raw and searching memoir was first published in 1994; it was reissued in 2021 following the success of Grann’s book (and including a glowing foreword by the latter author). Pawhuska-born John Joseph Mathews included the story in his 1932 Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road.18 Charles Red Corn, the murder of whose grandfather Raymond Red Corn Sr. during the reign of terror was never solved, and whose son Yancey and nephew Talee both act in Killers, made the period the setting of his subtle and dazzling novel A Pipe for February (2002), now graced with a cover blurb from Grann and an admiring foreword from Scorsese. For McAuliffe, who covers the sensational story as part of his exhaustive research into the unsolved murder of his Osage grandmother Sibyl Bolton, Hale’s gang were upstart “amateurs” in relation to the “the big-league, bloodless murderers of ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of Osages” who knew better than to draw so much attention to what they were doing.19 Sibyl’s murder, shot while sitting on her porch, in fact makes a brief appearance in Killers, its details part of a brutally succinct montage of “additional” killings, one of the film’s gestures toward the broader context of Ernest’s story.

The first cinematic representation of the reign of terror was Nanticoke filmmaker James Young Deer’s 1926 silent film, Tragedies of the Osage Hills, which unfortunately has not survived.20 In 1959, one episode of Hollywood veteran Mervyn LeRoy’s epic docudrama The FBI Story cast James Stewart as a composite agent; the lobby card promised, “Posing as rancher, Hardesty hunts killers of oil-rich Osage Indians. This and other bizarre crimes are shown on-screen for the first time.” There was, in other words, a rich representational history of the Osage Reign of Terror in best-selling nonfiction, in Osage- or Native-authored fiction and nonfiction, and in popular filmmaking. Scorsese’s film includes explicit and implicit references to this varied tradition, drawing especially from Red Corn’s novel in addition to the titular source. But Scorsese also references the broader tradition of the Western, in particular the liberal, Shakespearean vision of John Ford’s oeuvre and the operatic, revisionist vision of Sergio Leone’s 1969 magnum opus Once Upon a Time in the West.

It’s not clear the order in which Scorsese and his team incorporated these different sources. The original screenplay centered the arc of Tom White as Grann had done, and it centered White’s story even more than did the detailed pages of Grann’s book, which allowed the story to reach in myriad directions. Scorsese reports being dissatisfied with the script and reaching out to the Osage; members of the Osage Council recall being concerned about what they were hearing about the adaptation and reaching out to Scorsese.21 What all parties agree on is that Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and their entourage made the journey to Osage County and listened carefully to what they heard. DiCaprio, whom Scorsese had cast as Tom White, switched roles to the hapless Ernest and the script was rewritten around Ernest and Mollie’s relationship.

During these conversations, various Osage individuals also pleaded with Scorsese to downplay the violence; as Jim Gray, a former chief of the Osage Nation and great-grandson of Henry Roan, a friend and ward of Hale’s who was murdered on Hale’s orders, worried, “I have no doubt we’re going to get slow motion pictures of Osages getting their heads blown off.”22 “150 of us in the room,” Gray continued, describing the visit. “Each us had a chance to say a few words. I had a few words to say about the fact that the three biggest movie blockbusters, by the terms of your industry, that had a Native theme were Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans and Little Big Man. And all three of these stories have something in common. One is that they require a white person to tell the story and save the day. Two, they require a white writer to write a story of fiction.”23 Killers does a lot differently than those three films; it also resembles them precisely as Gray worried it would.

What We Did There

Although Scorsese and scriptwriter Eric Roth listened to those 150 Osage and shifted the script, Killers remains very much in the lineage of what we might call the “worthy Western” of which Gray’s trio of “blockbusters” are prominent examples. The opening scene, lifted directly from the prologue to A Pipe for February, depicts a spiritual leader’s (played by Talee Red Corn, the author’s nephew) ritual burial of a Sacred Pipe to mark the forced agreement to send Osage children to English-language boarding schools. In both Red Corn’s novel and Killers, it marks the stepping into a different culture and a different ontological framework. Scorsese plays it as a tragic fall issuing in the loss of agency and the victimization of the Osage, pairing it with a dubious dance of joy around an oil geyser. For Red Corn’s elders, however, it’s a recognition and processing of unwanted change, introducing the reader to a narrator, John Grayeagle, who in 1924 will lose his beloved grandfather as he wrestles with the challenge of “living the past” and “living the future” at the same time.24 John will struggle with the violence, graft, and deceit with which he and his young friends and family are surrounded. But they will learn to use the whites’ prejudices against them, identify allies Native and non-Native, keep their own counsel, and effectively protect themselves from mortal peril even as they reckon with losses all around them. The voice Red Corn crafts for John is deceptively simple, using his boarding school English to negotiate Osage and white elders alike, and compelling the reader, whether sooner or later, to take him and his circle seriously as an actor in the world despite his youth and the apparent frivolity with which they make use of and sometimes even enjoy the riches from their family headrights. There are traces of John’s attitude in Mollie’s inscrutable taciturnity, even though she is nearly always filtered through Ernest’s perspective, which is usually ours.

Following the brief prologue, Killers provides historical exposition in the form of a fictional 1920s newsreel on “the chosen people of chance” that for a well-informed viewer patently reproduces the paternalistic anti-Osage discourse of the time but for a viewer new to the material situates them firmly within a white framework of ostensible documentary truth. The period black and white of the newsreel smoothly segues into a color Steadicam shot of a railroad car packed full of both Osage and non-Osage, before settling on the familiar face of Leonardo DiCaprio and perhaps a glancing nod to Johnny Depp’s opening journey to the town of Machine in Jim Jarmusch’s anti-Western, Dead Man. The film quickly shifts more resolutely into epic Western territory, with a sweeping crane shot documenting Ernest’s arrival in Fairfax closely echoing Jill’s (Claudia Cardinale) arrival in Flagstone near the beginning of Leone’s Once Upon a Time on the West. It’s a scene teeming with confident Osage, devious white crooks and operators, and lots of poor white oil workers, a firm corrective to Leone’s vision, in which Charles Bronson plays “Harmonica,” whom Leone understood to be Native American, and Jason Robards plays a Mexican bandit named “Cheyenne.”

Along with John Ford’s corpus, Leone’s films have since the 1960s been enormously influential on cinematic representation of the West, especially outside the U.S. and among cinephiles – Dances with Wolves probably trumps them in American mainstream culture, especially since the success of Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone. Even more than with Leone, Scorsese subtly but unmistakably subverts Ford’s humanist, liberal vision of the West as a space where cultural conflict can be articulated and community potentially formed or reformed. A favored Fordian leitmotif was the traditional hymn “Shall We Gather at the River,” which he repeated in no fewer than eight different films, including three of his most iconic Westerns. In each, the music and its words signal rebirth into community, whether contrapuntally, as in Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956), or earnestly, as in the Sunday church scene in My Darling Clementine (1946) which brings local sheriff Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Eastern schoolmarm Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) briefly together on a dance floor in the shell of the emerging town church.

Sam Peckinpah had already riffed on Ford’s predilection by playing “Shall We Gather” behind the brutally transgressive opening slaughter in The Wild Bunch (1967). Scorsese, even more subtly, has it sung in the background of a late scene in Killers where Hale as benefactor and pillar of community is opening a new ballet school on the main street of Fairfax, flanked by young girls in tutus. He pulls aside one of the girl’s fathers and warns him about a robbery being committed that night at the man’s general store. Hale has in fact planned the robbery himself, as a way of eliminating Acie Kirby, the man who bombed Mollie’s sister Reta’s house. The grocer, forewarned, empties a shotgun into the robber’s guts. Scorsese manipulates tradition to disclose its fatal hypocrisies; Hale manipulates tradition to foment his criminal enterprises behind the mask of a pillar of the community.

Killers may initially present as a worthy Western, but Scorsese has effectively hybridized it with several other key American genres. Because we’re aware of Burkhart’s dubious motives from the beginning, his courtship of Mollie plays like film noir. At first, she holds her own in the gender-reversed manner of a male noir protagonist, aware of Ernest’s greed but confident she can control and domesticate him. But during the latter half, the film shifts her to a traditional female victim figure à la Ingrid Bergman’s characters in Notorious and Gaslight, slowly being poisoned by a treacherous husband who may or may not also love them. She is allowed to do almost nothing for nearly an hour except groan, look sickly, and wait to be rescued by the FBI. Meanwhile, the main plot around her has shifted from Western to gangster flick and police procedural. Arguably, the shift occurs the moment De Niro’s Hale enters the picture just a few minutes in, so dominant is De Niro’s actorly persona. This effect creates perhaps outsized sympathy for Hale as an outsider, self-made man who has made the effort to learn the Osage language and to befriend its People. Only in a very few scenes does Scorsese briefly allow De Niro to drop the façade and let Hale’s sheer villainy shine through.

But the more gravitas Hale takes on as a satanic archvillain, the more agency drops away from the Osage, and the more the scope of the reign of terror is reduced to one mastermind’s outsized crime spree. There are a few scenes sprinkled through the film that briefly but chillingly inform the attentive viewer how deeply embedded in Oklahoma society the reign of terror in fact was. For most of the movie, Hale’s wife and daughter present as typical gangster family: innocent of anything nefarious their upstanding paterfamilias might be up to. But then there’s a brief phone call from Hale’s wife to Mollie’s guardian warning him immediately to get anything of value out of the house he’s renting to Reta and her husband (it’s about to get blown up). I didn’t register this moment until the second time I watched the film; it reveals that she’s fully complicit in the most brutal of Hale’s crimes.

There’s a similar scene during the courtroom drama that dominates the denouement of the film. A lawyerly trick has paused the trial so that Ernest can meet with Hale and his attorney. The meeting takes place in a social gathering that includes not only Hale’s wife and daughter and Ernest’s brother Byron, but also pretty much every figure of authority in the town that we have come across or heard referred to in the film. The entire white power structure, in other words, is complicit in Hale’s crimes and the reign of terror, and in travestying justice to cover them up. It’s something I’ve never seen before in a mainstream movie, outside of the chilling conclusion to Rosemary’s Baby where Mia Farrow’s young mother discovers the satanic coven next door to her Upper West Side apartment, composed of pretty much everyone she had come to rely on, including her loving husband. Given the similar content, the visual echo feels intentional, even if Rodrigo Prieto’s lens is not quite so wide-angled as William Fraker’s.

Killers thus interweaves the Western, film noir, the gangster film, the police procedural, the courtroom drama, and even a bit of horror; however, it jumps between them with often elliptical editing in ways that productively challenge the viewer’s ability fully to connect all the different facts, events, and ramifications, especially the first time through. Equally interwoven are traces of another film entirely, something more like A Pipe for February than Grann’s Killers, a film in which we would experience and understand the story of these years as the Osage participants did and gain something of a Native perspective on the events beyond the static victimhood of a deer caught in the headlights. As Muskogee film scholar Jacob Floyd notes, Scorsese dotted the film with moments that would easily be grasped by the Osage but likely not by non-Native viewers. For example, the scene mentioned above where Hale sets up Kirby’s death opens on Ernest and unwilling accomplice John Mitchell (Ty Ramsay) crossing Main Street through a march by Osage mothers commemorating the sons they lost in the First World War.25 For a brief moment, the Osage are not just victimized Indigenous forerunners of the Beverly Hillbillies; they’re a bona fide American community fully worthy of the Fordian strains of “Shall We Gather” playing over their parade.

Twin scenes early in the film similarly isolate instances of agency and autonomy within the overarching narrative of victimhood. Henry Roan (William Belleau) has picked up Ernest at the station. Driving across the open land to Hale’s ranch, Ernest asks him whose land it is. “My land,” Henry laconically answers. When Mollie flirtatiously invites Ernest, now her driver, into her house for the first time, he flirts back, asking, “What color do you call your skin?” “My color,” she simply answers. The deadpan of both responses neatly captures Ernest’s facile assumptions along with the deft overturning of those assumptions by Henry and Mollie. Like the brief private conversations shared between Mollie and her sisters or mother, or the Tribal Council where Osage actors and extras in a sense played themselves, these moments come from a different genre and a different way of being in the world. And they’re usually followed by violence – Henry is shown murdered during the course of the film, along with at least a dozen others. Most of the murders are nasty, brutish, and short – a single pistol shot, a body in a pool of oil – and given little screen time at all. But the camera does linger on the dead, including several corpse effects, in particular the moment when Reta’s apparently intact body is turned over and her face falls off. Sublime violence typical of a gangster film, yes, but also one of the “slow motion pictures of Osages getting their heads blown off” that Jim Gray feared he would see.

A montage like this can be effective in showing the absolute disregard of white criminals for Osage lives; it’s also effective in giving the viewer space to feel the same way. It’s certainly possible to draw through the film a dark line of white complicity and one of the strongest condemnations and sharpest analysis of genocidal violence against Native Americans yet to be seen in a mainstream Hollywood film – a line Scorsese’s authorial introduction encourages us to seek out and follow. It’s a dark line that is equally embedded in the forms and codes of the classical Hollywood cinema, as Scorsese’s allusions and references equally emphasize. Killers in this reading is a brilliant, pitch-black evisceration of the damage done by settler colonialism and structural racism, and the de jure participation in that damage of well-nigh every social institution in this country.

This is the reading also hammered in by the self-referential coda where Scorsese reads Mollie’s obituary at the end of a true-crime distortion of the film’s events on a postwar radio show. And it’s a reading applauded by many critics of the film, a reading that reminds us of the instability of the forms we use to tell these stories and the challenge of representing facts when any telling of history will inevitably distort what happened. To work, we know, such a reading necessarily must remain open and ambiguous, and necessitate close and careful parsing of subtle details, grace notes, and rewritings of prior, less nuanced films. It’s a reading that requires Ernest not only to be a cold-blooded murderer but also to have loved his wife, for Hale to be a criminal mastermind who also truly loves the Osage. It’s a reading that makes the movie a satisfying dramatic tragedy, but it does not make it an Osage story.

Where We Are Now

That story is of a piece with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which Scorsese includes within the film as a newsreel the Native characters watch in the cinema. Hale was paroled in 1947 and “welcomed back by many,” although presumably not by all. Burkhart was pardoned by the governor of Oklahoma in 1965, despite a formal protest by the Osage Council, and also tried to return. But centering their duplicity equally centers the narrative arc in a few years in the 1920s. From the Osage perspective, the reign of terror was not ended by the conviction of Burkhart and Hale, nor has it still ended today. As Bigbee notes, “Many prominent Oklahoma families came out of this period with money, land and political influence that they still retain.”26 As of 2022, despite protests, Hale’s spurs were still included as part of an exhibit of historical memorabilia in the Fairfax Bank.27 Only in 1984 did Congress provide a legal pathway for the Osage to repurchase the “approximately 26 percent of all headright interest [that] is held by non-Osages, churches, universities, and other non-Osage institutions.”28 And as the narrator of Osage Murders explains, “The current generation of Osage feels that the money was the least important of their losses”; the reign of terror “created a hole in the cosmos of Osage culture.” “I often wonder,” Bigbee concludes, “how one deals with knowing your grandmother married your grandfather for the sole purpose of murdering him for his money.”29 Or how one deals with never knowing for certain whether they did or not.

In the coda of Killers, Grann recounts that when he was researching the book in Pawhuska, he received numerous requests to help discover the cause of many deaths that had remained either unexplained or been written off as alcohol poisoning or accidents. Ernest and Mollie’s granddaughter Margie tells Grann that she met Ernest when he returned to Osage County to stay with his brother Byron while she was a teenager, “very slight, with graying hair; his eyes looked so kind.”30 They lived in a trailer park just outside of the county; she didn’t visit him, but her father Cowboy did, despite the fact that Cowboy had learned that Ernest had ordered the bombing of Reta’s house knowing that the boy was supposed to be staying that night (an infection kept him at home). When Ernest died, he asked Cowboy to scatter his ashes in the Osage Hills. “‘Those ashes were in the house for days, just sitting there,” Margie recalled. “Finally, one night my dad got real mad and took the box and just chucked it over a bridge.’”31

There’s a category difference between the emotional ambivalence Scorsese’s dynamics elicit in a white viewer like me toward Burkhart and Hale and the ambivalence his grandfather and great-grand uncle’s behavior elicits from Cowboy or Margie. Scorsese’s telling can implicate us in historical complicity with the structures that enabled these crimes; however, it is unable to bring us into a space in which we can grasp the effect of these events on Cowboy or Margie or any of the other offspring of this generation. The closest we get is Mollie’s final dismissal of Ernest when he is unable to tell her the truth of what he has done. It’s a beautifully staged and beautifully filmed scene in which Mollie’s underplayed style is allowed fully to dictate the pace and the action, dominating Ernest completely in a neat mirroring of the first courtship scene when she silences him in the face of a raging storm. Still, the effect comes from the camera lingering on Ernest’s devastated face while a door sharply closes off-screen. Mollie escapes our gaze and our comprehension; only Burkhart is knowable.

The only other details we learn of Mollie in the film come from the radio show: “After Mollie divorced Ernest, she lived with her new husband John Cobb on the reservation. She died of diabetes on June 16, 1937.” Scorsese subsequently takes over the mic to read her local obituary, his voice dripping with ironic disdain: “‘Mrs. Mollie Cobb, 50 years of age, passed away at 11:00 o’clock Wednesday night at her home. She was a full-blood Osage. She was buried in the old cemetery in Gray Horse beside her father, her mother, her sisters, and her daughter. There was no mention of the murders,” he concludes, a disapproving grimace on his face. But every time I watch that scene, I wonder: how would I have wanted to be remembered? For the murders and tragedies that blighted my life, or for what Margie has been told “had been a good marriage, a period of happiness for her grandmother.”32 How can we know what she would have chosen?

The Osage and the broader Native reception of Killers has ranged from qualified enthusiasm to scathing dismissal. The Osage News printed reviews both positive and negative, and critics and creatives across the continent weighed in. Recurring themes were the question of who gets to tell whose story and how they tell it, the degree to which the white characters are centered, the lack of attention to ongoing structural factors extending far beyond the Osage reign of terror, and the focus on suffering and violence against women rather than on other elements of Native life and Native history. “The industry,” Anishinaabe writer Ali Nahdee argues, “doesn’t take kindly to Natives experiencing joy. . . . When films tackle topics like genocide, residential schools, and sexual assault, it’s imperative to incorporate love, comfort, healing, and joy too – because that’s a far more accurate depiction of reality. It’s not sugarcoating; it’s a necessity. It’s our lives.”33

For many Native viewers and creatives, though, the relative fidelity to key facts and tradiions, the repping, the work Killers created, and the opportunities they hoped it would create, outweighed any negatives. As Gray commented, “I would say my expectations were met and exceeded by how much Osage culture and language is present in the film. . . . 1920s Osage Nation came to life in this film in a way that I can’t really put into words.”34 Akwesasne Mohawk journalist Vincent Schilling reports feeling that he was watching, “for the very first time in a film of this caliber, a painstakingly accurate portrayal of Native people in terms of the Osage language, regalia and traditions. . . . I never ever thought I would see a film like this.”35 Osage News editor Shannon Shaw Duty simply concluded: “If you’re wondering if you should go see this film, at least go see it for Gladstone’s performance.”36 McAuliffe put it this way: “Let me quote my cousin, who saw it shortly before he died: ‘It wasn’t as bad as I feared.’ That’s exactly what I would say.”37

Others were more ambivalent about the positives. Christopher Cotê, an Osage language consultant on the film, found much to admire, while also adding that, “As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that.”38 American University professor and registered Chickasaw Elizabeth Rule explained, “I do see the value of the film coming from its ability to raise awareness, especially among non-Native viewers, about the violence that our communities face historically and today.” Then she added, “I wish that there was a message letting audiences know that the violence they witnessed was not the result of individual greed but rather of the systemic devaluing of Indigenous lives under the process of settler colonialism. The film gives us a look into one family’s experiences, but the story of violence is a common one shared by hundreds of tribes across the US and it also didn’t start or end in the 1920s.”39

Many responses, especially by women, singled out the white male lens of the narrative. Mohawk actress Devery Jacobs dismissed the film in a social media post: “I don’t feel that these very real people were shown honor or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths. Contrarily, I believe that by showing more murdered Native women on-screen, it normalizes the violence committed against us and further dehumanizes our people.” Nahdee’s harsh reaction reflected a number of remarks by Native women critics: “For nearly four hours, we watch white men murder Native women over and over again. . . . Authenticity is a euphemism non-Native filmmakers use for what Natives call ‘trauma porn.’ They think showing the absolute worst of what happened to us in grisly detail is somehow respecting us.”40 Jacobs, Nahdee, and others stressed the experience of the film itself, and a triggering identification with the events being fictionalized in it.

For Gladstone herself, the movie is necessary precisely because it somehow still touches on what it leaves out: “Why the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement should have begun at colonial contact and how our Indigenous women are still in danger every day. . . . I’m struggling to think of another film that had such a strong presence that was so real of Native women, Indigenous women.”41 Jacob Floyd, professor at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU, broadens Gladstone’s remarks, concluding that “history lives in the present for Indigenous people; the Osage Reign of Terror and the ongoing MMIW crisis are part of the same legacy of settler-colonial policies.”42

Navajo, Oglala Lakota and Umoⁿhoⁿ (Omaha) actor and comedian Tatanka Means drew that legacy back to the cinematic tradition when interviewed at the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere: “That’s how the world learns about us, through cinema. That’s how they’ve always learned about us, Indian Country, is through cinema. From the early wild west shows that came to Europe early on, and then through the early John Wayne westerns and everything like that. That horrible portrayal of us through those and that’s how the world learns about us. Now they’re going to be learning about this part of history in such a truthful way – that’s backed by the Osage Nation, that’s supported and had their involvement in it.”43 Means’s analysis jibes with Cotê’s conclusion that Killers “isn’t made for an Osage audience; it was made for everybody not Osage.”44

Still, the closer you get to the history, the more other ways of experiencing Killers also reveal themselves. When Lily Gladstone received the Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama, the first ever for a Native actor, their first words were in Siksiká, spoken directly to the Blackfeet People who raised them.45 Hollywood has a dreadful track record in following up on solid roles for non-white awardees. Nevertheless, there’s no question that Gladstone’s award and the justifiably lauded performances of many other Native professionals in the film will have at least some effect on representation on-screen as well as participation behind the scenes. According to Yancey Red Corn, for instance, “Scorsese was mentoring his son, Miles Thorpe Red Corn, who has written script for a TV series based on ‘A Pipe for February.’”46

In other words, one can fault Killers of the Flower Moon in a variety of ways for not going farther than it does. This critique should not negate the many things it does accomplish, both within its narrative and in its paratextual and industry effects. But it seems too easy simply to say, as many critics have done, that this is the only way Scorsese could have told this story. It’s not; however, in many ways the movie is absolutely consistent with the filmmaker Scorsese is. The critique against its unremitting violence, its tragic and guilt-ridden reading of history, and its male-dominated perspective could be leveled at many of his films, and certainly at the most iconic of them. Still, it is important to distinguish an aesthetic and ideological critique of Killers as a piece of Scorsese’s oeuvre from a reading more particularly focused on the ways the film negotiates the novel (for him) task Scorsese took on: telling a Native story, and one embedded in American history and in intimate violence to which many of his Osage cast and crew had direct connections.

Few mainstream movies succeed in fully navigating among the different needs and expectations of different communities. But if a choice is going to be made, shouldn’t it be for the historically marginalized communities that have so seldom had their stories told on their terms than for the mainstream America that has never lacked for them? When Grann meets Mollie and Ernest’s granddaughter Margie in Gray Horse, she recounts how she often worries about what she might have inherited from Burkhart and Hale. “She said that occasionally The FBI Story would air on local television, and she and her family would watch it and cry.”47 Just as Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich recall the ambivalent experience of watching John Wayne Westerns on the big screen, or Victor Joseph teases Thomas-Builds-the-Fire in Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals for the number of times he has watched Dances with Wolves, there’s a steep cost in being able only to participate in mainstream culture through dominant perspectives. One workaround is through familiarity – recognizing one’s own history within a narrative that inadvertently captured it, as in the scene in Nanook Revisited or Margie’s family crying to The FBI Story rather than identifying with James Stewart. It might be the way Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond screens old Western footage for Effie and James Etna, an elderly Navajo couple, from when they were teenaged extras and that they’re seeing for the first time: “Can you see your husband there?” Diamond queries. “Maybe that’s him falling off his horse,” Effie jests.48 Or when in Reel Injun Diamond subtitles for the first time the dialogue other Navajo extras would ad lib knowing that it would go untranslated and unremarked, except, of course, by other Navajo: “Just like a snake crawling in your own shit” are the words one chieftain abuses an army office with in a Technicolor 1964 Western.

Just as nothing prevented Scorsese and his associates from reaching out proactively to the Osage, or from responding when the Osage reached out to him, nothing prevented a filmmaker of Scorsese’s standing from bringing Osage or other Native collaborators on board, not only to ensure historical, cultural, and linguistic accuracy, but to open up the ways history can be written and told. What that movie would have looked like is another story, and it’s certainly arguable that that other story would not have received the plaudits, the box office, and the awards of this Killers, including for its Native participants. But a look at the ways many Native authors recount their and this country’s history when finding the opportunity can give us a reasonable estimation of the form such a collaboration might have taken.

In the final chapter of A Pipe for February, John Grayeagle reflects on his experience, on the art he still hopes to create, and on the people “who will do anything to get an illegal deed to land that belongs to the Osage” and the “others, like the people at the Agency, and lawyers, and business people, who may once have been good people, but their greed made them do evil things.”49 These people, he concludes, he has no interest in painting. Instead, he wants to paint “good, honest people who make up the town” and whom thinking of “places my mind on the right track.” And he wants “to start painting the Osage history,” which may be a “life symbol” and may be “a group picture.”50 It will definitely need to capture, he concludes, the “mysteries of life” that he saw in the elder “Mon-tse-no-pi’n’s eyes on that day I first sketched him” and retain the power of voice and ritual of the old days, not all of which was buried with the pipe at the beginning of the novel.51 And finally, when’s he’s confident of his abilities, John wants to paint a family portrait: his grandfather.

To its credit, Killers does capture an inkling of Red Corn’s approach in a final scene that fully escapes the frame formed by the director’s own interventions at the beginning and the end, and constitutes, for Floyd, “perhaps the most important scene in the film.”52 Scorsese cuts abruptly from a close-up of his own face resting mournfully on the last word of Mollie’s obituary to a close-up of the head of a large tribal drum, a dozen sticks beating in unison. The camera pulls up vertically to reveal an ever-growing circle of dancers singing together to the beat of the drum. They are dressed not in the iconic Pendleton blankets of the 1920s Osage but in a diverse hybrid of traditional and contemporary costume, hairstyles, headdresses, and hats. The drone elevates higher to reveal circle after circle of dancing figures rotating around the central drum: a living flower sprung up where the killing moon of May had laid all to waste.

More than 700 Osage had come from as far away as Oregon in response to the casting call for extras in what Osage News editor Shannon Shaw Duty described as a “family reunion.”53 In May 2022, hundreds of Osage extras and crew members assembled with their friends and families on the Osage Nation campus to film the final scene’s celebration dance. The song was composed for the film by Osage Language Department director Vann Bighorse and singer Scott George. On a closed set following a message of thanks from the director, George described the song to the assembled Osage: “So you know what you’re listening to, what you’re hearing, we’re talking about our people. We want you to stand up, we want you to get up and dance and know that God got you here. That God got our people this far, like that. That’s the words of my song.”54 The singing continues as the screen fades to black, giving way to the film’s title, first in Osage, then in English, and then the names of all the white folk, mostly men, who directed, wrote, and produced it. The first Native name (to my knowledge) that appears is the late lamented Mohawk musician Robbie Robertson, who composed the haunting and vibrant score, a movie buff who had hired Scorsese to direct The Last Waltz back in 1974.

All credit to Scorsese for giving the Osage the last word in his movie, and for allowing that word to be, like all family gatherings, at once celebratory and mournful, and to stand as visual evidence that the Osage Nation had not in fact been extinguished or defeated during the reign of terror, but lives on. In the words of David Treuer, “Clearly the Osage were not only militarily and physically strong; they were fierce and effective negotiators as well. And they remain.”55 How easy, though, for a non-Native viewer to read this ritual of continuance as an acknowledgment of closure and forgiveness of what they have been watching for the past three hours plus. A Native telling of this story, I believe, more likely would weave these traces of Osage story in a full fabric that would reckon with past, present, and future in a single breath, giving full space to the reign of terror while noting its place as a single horrific episode in a settler colonial history composed of little else, and situating all that history within the far broader weave that is the life and history of the Osage and of Indian Country.

McAuliffe, for instance, concludes The Deaths of Sibyl Bolton with the realization, after having reclaimed a Native heritage, warts and all, that he had discovered only as a teenager that “my home is my history, and now all of my history is in my son.”56 His home, he continues, has rooms for his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Chief Pawhuska, White Hair, as also for William H. Conner, son of a white Kansas trader and an Osage woman, as also for Sibyl Bolton, his murdered grandmother, as also for many others.57 “If you want to know America,” Treuer concludes his time-jumping survey of Native America since 1890, “if you want to see it for what it was and what it is – you need to look at Indian history and at the Indian present.”58

If we don’t recognize, Treuer argues, that “Indians lived on, as more than ghosts, as more than the relics of a once happy people,” if we don’t record “the tiny, fretful, intricate details” of those who were massacred at Wounded Knee and in so many other times and places, including Osage County, “their sense of life – and our sense of their lives – died with them,” and the pain and loss of the massacre is doubled, and “we die too, in our own minds . . . when we paint over them with the tragedy of ‘the Indian.’”59 It’s that redoubled pain that I hear in many of the critiques of Killers and that makes me wish Scorsese could have made the additional leap this material demanded. Killers leaves glimpses of those lives Treuer pleads for; it does so whenever the Osage and other Native contributors to the film are given free rein over their voice and their presence. In cleaving to a tragic historiography and in constraining his narrative to a discrete and finished past in the 1920s, Scorsese ensures that his audience will sit once again with the tragedy of what American history has been; however, he equally ensures that they will have no need to reckon with the ongoing traumas of that history, with how to heal from them, or with what to do about them in the present beyond shudder and weep with regret.

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Author’s note: I want to thank my colleagues at American University for encouraging me to write about this film, and for sources they provided, especially Erik Dussere, Anton Fedyashin, Paul Fileri, Despina Kakoudaki, and Jeffrey Middents. Unless otherwise noted, images are copied from the official trailer of Killers of the Flower Moon.