Killers of the flower moon

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is the sprawling story of a criminal investigation undoing a systemic evil. It lays out in riveting detail the mystery of the Osage murders of the 1920s, when dozens of Native Americans were killed in a grand conspiracy to exploit their oil-rich land. Grann digs into the societal phenomenon surrounding the Osage, many of whom became ultra-wealthy after generations of displacement and persecution. But the book’s through line is the federal investigator Tom White, who helped solve the murders on the orders of a young J. Edgar Hoover. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will be released in theaters this October, takes a very different narrative approach. White (played by Jesse Plemons) and his agents are characters in the movie, but Scorsese (who co-wrote the film with Eric Roth) focuses more on a particularly complex marriage explored tangentially in Grann’s book, between the chauffeur Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the Osage tribe member Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). Their seemingly loving partnership had nefarious underpinnings: in white landowners’ efforts to seize Native Americans’ rights and money. The resulting story is extraordinarily told. It should certainly prove to be the splashiest cinematic release yet from Apple TV+, which co-produced the movie with Paramount Pictures. In funding a three-and-a-half-hour, Oscar-friendly epic, Appl...

In Killers of the Flower Moon, writer and journalist David Grann offers an intimately detailed account of a little-known but devastating chapter in American history: the Osage Reign of Terror, officially recognized as a period of five years from 1921 to 1926 during which upwards of twenty Osage Indians were murdered in cold blood for access to their valuable shares of oil money. The Osage, whose reservation just outside of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, once sat atop one of the largest oil deposits in the country, and whose legal protection under tribal law gave each member of the tribe a headright (a share of the mineral trust), were the wealthiest group of people in the country per capita by the early 1920s. In most cases, though, the Osage were deemed “incompetent” by the government and forced to enter into guardianships, in which their own funds were beyond their control, and their white neighbors were placed in control of the overflowing accounts. As white Americans began hearing sensationalized tales of the Osage’s wealth, many became indignant—and those living in the towns on and around the Osage reservation sought to dispatch members of the tribe through cruelty, trickery, and downright evil in order to inherit their fortunes. Grann divides his tale into three parts. The first part of the book, set in the early 1920s, focuses on the world of the Osage Nation and focuses particularly on one family of Osage Indians. Mollie Burkhart, a full-blooded Osage woman, is married to a w...

Taken in 1924, the picture showed members of the Osage Nation alongside white settlers, but a section had been cut out. When I asked the museum director why, she said it contained the image of a figure so frightening that she’d decided to remove it. She then pointed to the missing panel and said, “The devil was standing right there.” My new book, . In the early 20th century, the members of the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their reservation. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off. The full panorama of Osage Nation members and white settlers in Osage County, Oklahoma. Courtesy Archie Mason In 1923, after the death toll reached more than two dozen, the case was taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was among the F.B.I.’s first major homicide investigations. During my research, I collected an extensive archive of photographs. They provide another essential means of documenting a crime largely forgotten by history. What follows is a collection of some of the most revealing photographs, as well as a clip of related film footage. In the early 1870s, the Osage were driven from their lands in A camp on the new Osage Nation reservation in Oklahoma. Courtesy the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Finney No. 231. Around the turn of the century, oil deposits were discov...

Killers of the Flower Moon describes the Osage Reign of Terror—a period that stretched from the early 1920s to the 1930s, in which uncountable numbers of the oil-rich Osage Indian tribe were murdered in a mad grab for valuable shares of the tribe’s mineral trust. At the center of this tragedy was a deep, permeating racism that not only sought to diminish the Osage, but in many cases denied them their humanity entirely. Through a complicated but essentially state-sanctioned campaign of exploitation, American society at the time—from the federal government all the way down to the racist and greedy white Americans who lived alongside the tribe in supposed harmony—systematically and brutally dispatched the Osage. In relaying the Osages’ story, David Grann argues that longstanding, deeply-ingrained racism towards Native Americans and the resulting sense of indignity when the Osage tribe came into good fortune was responsible for the exploitation, cruelty, and murder that came to define a significant chapter of the tribe’s history. Grann demonstrates throughout the text the ways in which deeply racist attitudes towards Native Americans—and the wealthy Osage in particular—informed societal treatment of the tribe. After being pushed off of their ancestral lands by the uncaring American government for centuries, the Osage were, in the early 1870s, forced onto a rocky, relatively infertile slab of hilly land in what would soon become the state of Oklahoma. The Osage, realizing that ...

At 80, Scorsese and his Oscar winning co-writer of the screenplay Eric Roth have adapted David Grann’s 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, but though meticulously researched and told by Grann, their take on the book veers strongly from the FBI part and instead smartly goes for the jugular and soul of a moment in time where greed and money drove white men to unspeakable acts. With a complicated love story at its center, Scorsese and his collaborators have made something that stands firmly on its own. Related Story Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio & Robert De Niro On How They Found The Emotional Handle For Their Cannes Epic ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Grann is a journalist-turned-bestselling author whose works seem tailor-made for the movies. His The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon gave director James Gray the rip-roaring material to make what I think is still his finest film — also not one attempting to shoot the book as it were, but to get to the heart of it. That is what Scorsese has done in spades with Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann’s best-known work to date, centering it not on the Texas Ranger-turned-FBI agent Tom White who became the “white savior” for the Osage community when he cracked the case in 1923, but rather on the suspects involved in a scheme to take back what the white man believed was naturally theirs. It was diabolical, no less so because its architect convinced those involved th...

The 156-minute film also stars The Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy In an Carrying a budget of $200m, the Apple-funded movie marks the tech streamer’s most expensive bet to date. The company has teamed up with Paramount to give the film a wide theatrical release before heading to Apple TV+. “The risk is there, showing in a theater in the first place,” Scorsese said. “But the risk for this subject matter, and then for running time. It’s a commitment.” Tweeting the trailer out today, DiCaprio Next week the film will have its world premiere at the Cannes film festival alongside new films from Wes Anderson and Jonathan Glazer. It will open in cinemas on 6 October.