I haven’t seen the movie, but I read the book. And I have studied some history. The Sooner State was settled by cheaters, that’s how it got its name. Rules don’t conquer territory.
During the early 20th century, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were systematically murdered by white settlers. Yet outside the Osage Nation, the history of this racial injustice — one of the worst in American history — was distorted and then largely erased from memory.
The story of what’s now called the Osage Reign of Terror is essential to understanding America’s past. After vast oil deposits were discovered under their lands, the Osage were suddenly, by the 1920s, among the wealthiest people per capita in the world.
In the year 1923 alone, the roughly 2,000 Osage on the tribal roll received a total of more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.
As their wealth increased, though, it unleashed an insidious backlash across the country. The U.S. government passed legislation requiring many Osage to have white guardians to manage their fortunes — a system that was both abhorrently racist and widely corrupt.
Then the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances: There were shootings, poisonings and even a bombing.
After the official death toll reached at least 24, the Osage Tribal Council issued a resolution demanding that federal authorities investigate. The case was taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1926 an undercover team of operatives finally caught a flamboyantly brutal killer and two of his henchmen.
The bureau’s young director, J. Edgar Hoover, promptly closed the case, and the story of how his men had triumphantly ended the Reign of Terror by apprehending the mastermind became the widely accepted version of events.
Yet there was a much deeper and darker conspiracy that the bureau never exposed.
Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau.
The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.
It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.”
The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24.
One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”
“The True Story Behind ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Is Being Erased From Oklahoma Classrooms” is a guest essay by Jim Gray and David Grann. Mr. Gray is a former Osage chief whose great-grandfather was killed during the Reign of Terror. Mr. Grann is a journalist and the author of the book “Killers of the Flower Moon.” New York Times, Oct. 20. 2023.
I share this excerpt in the belief the accurate depiction of history won’t hurt us.
And we will never get better if we don’t start telling ourselves the truth.
In this region, the usual socioeconomic dynamics of America had been upended—the long-oppressed Native people had access to a kind of life that had exclusively been designed and intended for white people. And because of this, the Osage people found themselves in terrible danger.
The white men in the town began to kill the Osage for their money—but not simply that, as if that isn’t terrible enough. The Osage people were courted, cornered, cajoled, conspired against, and legally captured by the greedy, jealous white people in the region—swearing friendship and loyalty, ingratiating themselves into their families, marrying into the Nation, taking control of their finances, and milking them every way they could.
Killing them was only the final step in the systematic destruction, dilution, dehumanization, and devastation of an entire people, culture, and history.
It is an act of such profound evil that it seems both impossible to comprehend and all-too-possible to believe happening in America.
OLIVIA RUTIGLIANO