Martin Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a 2017 book of the same name by David Grann that chronicled a true story of Osage Indians being systematically murdered in the 1920s.
Fifty years earlier, the Osage had been driven from their ancestral lands in Kansas to a reservation in Oklahoma deemed by the Department of Indian Affairs to be “rocky, sterile, and unfit for cultivation”. It was then found to contain huge reserves of oil.
This oil brought enormous riches to the Osage people, who legally enjoyed “headrights” to land that could not be bought, only inherited. But it also led to a gruesome tale of white entrepreneurs marrying into the Osage clan to murder their relatives and make off with the family wealth.
