History Is A Merciless Judge: A Look at 'Killers of the Flower Moon'
Hey everyone,
Little rare Saturday post from Niko today—she went and saw Killers of the Flower Moon after reading the book. In this essay she takes a look at the two, exploring how violence is enacted in each. There are some graphic descriptions of violence in here, so if that’s not your jam, you might want to skip this one.
“History is a merciless judge,” writes David Grann (Chapter 23). The investigative journalist pores over archival documents related to the Osage murders of the 1920s. A disturbing number of headlines recount an inordinate number of Osage deaths: “PAWHUSKA MAN’S NUDE BODY FOUND,” “GRUESOME FIND ENDS QUEST FOR MARY LEWIS,” “CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS” (Chapters 23, 25, 5). The inclination to dramatize also rears itself in these historical headlines: “OLD WILD WEST STILL LIVES IN LAND OF OSAGE MURDERS” (Chapter 19). Now, this inclination rises again in Hollywood as Martin Scorsese brings the stories into full view on the big screen in his adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
The brutal murders of members of the Osage supposedly began in the early 1920s, after the tribe came into great wealth from leasing oil lots on their land. Grann’s book brings that date into question, and widens our view of it: These murders were part of a much larger racist attack on the Osage. Scorsese’s adaptation brings the book to the big screen in a significant way: When the film made its debut this year at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it received a 9-minute standing ovation.
Interesting, Flower Moon is not the first time Scorsese’s thought of portraying violence toward Native Americans. Around 1976, sometime after the release of Taxi Driver, Marlon Brando approached Scorsese with an offer to direct a dramatization of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, focusing on the Lakota massacre. The project never materialized. But if any mainstream Hollywood director was primed to make this story a movie, it would be Scorsese.
This article isn’t a review nor is it meant to fact-check the movie to the book (other sources can do that). Instead, I want to compare how Grann and Scorsese examine violence and complicity through the story of the Osage murders. Spoilers from here on out. As a warning, there are graphic descriptions of death and murder.
In the early 20th century, after the Osage were moved off their land and forced to sell more of it, they managed to attain a settlement which granted them rights to “the oil, coal, and other minerals covered by the lands” (Grann, chapter 4). The money made from leasing their underground reserves turned the Osage into “the wealthiest people per capita in the world.” In 1923, the tribe earned $30 million ($400 million today) to share between 2,000 individuals (Grann, chapter 1). Members of the tribe each received a headright that entitled them to their share of the profit. These headrights could only be passed down through inheritance, unless someone married into the family, as was the case with Mollie and Ernest Burkhart.
As an investigative journalist, Grann builds his story in three parts: the first, titled “The Marked Woman” recounts the murders that began in 1921 and seemingly ended in 1925, focusing on Mollie Burkhart’s, and the death of her mother and three sisters. Mollie’s sister Anna was found shot in the back of the head, while her sister Rita and Rita’s husband Bill were killed by a bomb planted under their house. This period is known as the “Reign of Terror'' when approximately 30 Osage and Osage family members were murdered.
The second part, “The Evidence Man,” introduces Tom White, a Texas Ranger hired by J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner to the FBI), who helped unravel the plot against Mollie’s family and exposed her husband, Ernest Burkhart, and his uncle, William K. Hale, as conspirators and murders. After the deaths of her family members, Mollie inherited the headright of her family. If she were to die, her husband Ernest would become the benefactor. Hale, who dubbed himself king of the Osage Hills, was a looming figure in the community with lots of power and influence. He was convicted of first degree murder for the death of Henry Roan, an Osage man and the ex-husband of Mollie Burkhart, but conspired in the murders of at least six others, including Mollie’s family.
In the third and final section, Grann brings himself into the story. He describes his time with the descendants of the Osage, hearing stories and seeing the effect the murders have in the present day. He also shows through the meticulous investigation and research that the oft-told murders taking place during the “Reign of Terror” were not the only ones, that William K. Hale was not the singular mastermind, and that many other white people, men and women, killed their wives and husbands and even children to gain access to headrights and oil money. Grann estimates that the Osage deaths are possibly in the hundreds (Grann chapter 26). Most of these were attributed to “consumption,” “wasting illness,” or “causes unknown,” but deaths appear with alarming frequency.
Grann builds the air of conspiracy and distrust in the first chapter before revealing the true betrayal in the style of a courtroom drama. The discovery that Ernest Burkhart was conspiring against his own family is particularly devastating. Grann writes:
“White couldn’t determine whether Ernest’s marriage to Mollie—four years before Anna’s murder—had been conceived from the outset as part of the plot, or if Hale had prevailed upon his nephew to betray her after they married. In either case, the plan was so brazen, so sinister, that it was hard to fathom. It demanded that Ernest share a bed with Mollie, and raise children with her, all while plotting and scheming against her family.” (Chapter 15)
While the Reign of Terror officially lasted four years, Grann demonstrates that killings of the Osage for their headrights started before 1921, possibly with the disappearance of Mary Lewis in 1918 and the discovery of her skull and body in a swamp, and ended long after, in 1931, when an Osage man, in perfect health, dropped dead after he suspected his white wife was poisoning him. It’s hard to summarize how wide-spread these killings were. Grann recounts looking through logbooks from the Office of Indian Affairs that document white guardians and their Osage wards (many adult Osage were deemed “incompetent” and were assigned white guardians who approved of how they spent their money). “If a ward passed away while under guardianship, a single word was usually scrawled by his or her name: ‘Dead.’” (Chapter 26) In reading through, he discovers many guardians had multiple dead wards. “One had eleven Osage wards, eight of whom had died. Another guardian had thirteen wards, more than half of whom had been listed as deceased. And one guardian had five wards, all of whom died.” Many of these deaths went uninvestigated, and so the violence against the Osage spirals out in a web of conspiracy that can only be fully understood through a retrospective lens.
Unlike the novel, which tells the story of the Osage murders spiraling outward, the movie drills into the heart of the matter. Scorsese refocused the movie to center on the relationship between Mollie (played by Lily Gladstone) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), rather than from the perspective of Tom White (Jesse Plemons in the movie). As the audience then, we see Ernest Burkhart and William K. Hale (Robert De Niro) talking together about the inheritance of headrights and organizing the executions. We see Hale indoctrinating Burkhart (“their time is over”). We see Ernest courting Mollie. We see Hale speaking the Osage language to the Natives, how he is a trusted member of the community. As a director, Scorsese fills in the character details for us to better understand the personal betrayal and violence that Grann, as an investigative journalist, cannot responsibly provide because it might involve speculation.
And of course, we see the violence. The audience doesn’t discover a dead body with the investigators; Scorsese shows us the murders. In the first fifteen minutes, the camera cuts to a man lying on the floor, convulsing and foaming at the mouth, dying from poisoned alcohol. Three men walk toward an oil rig together before one shoots an Osage man in the back of the head. During the trial, there are flashbacks to Anna’s death by the river, as her killers recount the incident with cold and automatic responses. The enacted violence is visceral and unsentimental. They are almost all filmed in wide angles, as if to convey the distance these white men feel from the murders they are carrying out.
On the one hand, the film portrayal helps us live through the violence of the Reign of Terrors, and helps us understand the environment of the story. But on the other hand, these scenes don’t convey the scale that Grann makes sure to emphasize in his books. In the opening of the movie, Mollie lists a handful of names of other Osage members killed and their supposed cause of death (all uninvestigated) while the camera shows dead bodies lying still in their beds. As a reader of the book, I had wondered how Scorsese was going to account for the scale of the killings and thought that these depictions, of uninvestigated deaths, would continue throughout the movie. But they are only given at the beginning. If these depictions of uninvestigated deaths had continued, it would have helped to demonstrate how widespread these killings were, how complicit others were, and how the murderers were not just a small group of family members.
Coming out seven years after the book, Killers of the Flower Moon the movie includes historical moments that have risen into popular conscious again in 2023: the Tulsa race massacre and the rise of the KKK, neither of which are mentioned in book but both of which occurred around the same time as the Osage Reign of Terror. In one scene, Hale watches a newsreel about the massacre in Tulsa, while in another, Ernest walks by a parade with white-hooded men (presumably the KKK). By depicting these incidents, the film shows how widespread racial violence was and is: a reminder that the Osage murders, just like Hale’s own murderous streak, are not a singular anomaly.
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Scorsese’s movie has also been criticized for focusing too much on Ernest, giving him a conscience and taking away from the pain of Mollie and her family. In other words, perhaps the movie gives too much screen time to the villains and not enough time to the victims. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Christopher Cote, a language coordinator for the film, gives a wonderfully nuanced take and his reaction to the film. As mentioned, Grann’s portrayal doesn’t dwell or speculate on Ernest’s inner psyche while the movie builds out a full character. But in the final chapters, Grann speaks with contemporary Osage who say over and over “What kind of a person could do this?” (Chapter 22). This is the question Scorsese tries to answer by placing Ernest at the center of his story: What kind of person can enact evil?
Similarly, the movie asks, how long can a person be complicit? Grann asks similar questions when he wonders, “Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian?” (Chapter 20). These are worthwhile questions. Recognizing complicity in ourselves may be uncomfortable, but to not recognize it is dangerous.
The stories the Osage write about the Reign of Terror ask different questions. In a press interview with Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio, Gladstone mentions a book called A Pipe for February by Charles H. Red Corn, a novel about a young Osage man witnessing the murders. It opens with the lines,
“Osages were warriors and were able negotiators. Those two interwoven characteristics helped our people to hang on to our old customs and there was strength in those old ways. Our ancient culture was on a collision course with both good and evil forces of economics that would occur early in the nineteen hundreds when oil was discovered on our reservation. Some of our people abandoned the ancient teachings and some went a little crazy with wealth. Some of our people stood back and watched and tried to make sense of it in the context of the old culture.”
Already different questions arise: What happens to the traditions of a community when they see great change, especially great prosperity? What happens to those who try to hang on to those traditions? What happens to a Native American community when it adopts Western capitalist practices?
Having also read the book himself and consulted extensively with the Osage community, Scorsese also incorporates these questions into the script. Their inclusion helps illustrate the concerns of the community. During a community meeting, when the Osage are deciding to hire private detectives and send delegates to Washington D.C., one elder decries having ever gotten involved in the oil business. “This is white people money. It doesn’t belong to us,” he says. In another scene, Mollie’s mother, Lizzie, blames the murders and deaths on her children, saying, “This is because of you. You are all marrying white men.” The accusations from within the community, within the Osage, cannot be answered by outsiders, perhaps only referenced. Grann’s book doesn’t try. Their inclusion in the movie, at least, begins to open up a conversation about a history we may be forgetting.
If you are thinking at all about reading or watching Killers of the Flower Moon, I would highly recommend it. Did I come out of the theater crying? Yes. But there’s a lot more I could talk about with this story (the ending scene of the movie, Grann’s portrayal of Tom White), which I think is an indicator of how rich both the film and the movie are. Scorsese has also written a new introduction for A Pipe for February that I plan on reading next. I encourage everyone to go see the movies in theaters, since ticket purchases signal to the industry that people do care about these stories. However, the film will be available to stream on Apple TV probably later this year.
📚 Bibliography
Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. New York: Doubleday, 2017. eBook.
Scorsese, Martin, dir. Killers of the Flower Moon. California: Apple Studios, Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions, Appian Way Productions, 2023. Distributed by Apple Original Films, Paramount Pictures.
Red Corn, Charles H. A Pipe for February. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. eBook.
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