It’s only fitting that the word “Osage,” what the French decided to call the Native American tribe that’s actually named Wazhazhe, loosely translates to “calm water.” For, after enduring what was done to their tribe by the white men they “let” into the fold, the persistent stoicism of the Osage people is something that very few others would be able to uphold. Not in the wake of so much pain and suffering. Perhaps, though, part of the “calmness” that remained upon realizing the white men they “allowed” into their insular, oil-drenched world were nefarious as all get-out stemmed from a feeling of constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. As one Osage elder phrases it, “When this money started coming, we should have known it came with something else.” Knowing, somewhere just beneath the surface, that to trust a white man was to make deal with the devil (#whitedevil). After all, it was no secret that 1) white men’s involvement with anything meant exploitation and 2) white men never took (/take) kindly to the wealth of other races, always trying to characterize it as “unfair” or “rigged” or just plain “false.”
This, too, is why Martin Scorsese deftly opts to incorporate newsreels of the Tulsa massacre that were being played in Oklahoma theaters in 1921. A scene of Killers of the Flower Moon’s, er, chief villain, “King” William Hale (Robert De Niro) shows him watching the footage with rapt interest rather than horror. For it seemed to not only give him permission to keep murdering the Osage as part of his elaborate plan to gain access to various tribe members’ oil rights, but also provided further “creative inspiration” for how he could commit those murders. Of course, like most “kingpins,” he wasn’t wont to do the dirty work himself. Instead, he left that to his various lackeys, including his own nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio). It was he who married Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), one of the many wealthy Osage of Fairfax, where the reservation boundaries are coterminous with the town. While, in the movie, co-writers Scorsese and Eric Roth would have viewers believe that Burkhart really did marry Mollie out of love (at first), simple logic and reason tells us he knew damn well the core of that “love” was rooted in Mollie’s familial wealth. For the Osage were the rare tribe in the U.S. able to hold onto their mineral rights (through various conditions established in their treaties) once oil was discovered on their reservation territory.
Naturally, having unbridled control and access to their wealth would have been too good to be true. For, thanks to the Burke Act of 1906, Native Americans with any amount of sizable income (via a land allotment) were appointed white conservators to “help” them manage their finances. Of course, as we saw with Britney Spears, there isn’t much altruism in conservatorships when large sums of money are involved and the conservatee can be so easily exploited. Not only that, but consistently demeaned every time they had to meet with their conservator and say aloud, about themselves, “Incompetent” before proceeding to tell that conservator what amount of money they wanted and how they would be using it. Scenes of Mollie having to endure this utterly debasing practice is complete with her obsequiously agreeing to “keep a better eye out” for how her mother is spending, as though Lizzie (Tantoo Cardinal) doesn’t have every goddamn right to spend her oil money how she pleases.
For those wondering why so many Osage women would “let” the (rather dumb) white foxes into their utopian henhouse, so to speak, one must consider that, as an indigenous person, even having money didn’t assert one’s power in the “white world” (that is to say, a world where white hegemony had asserted itself for centuries). The “best” way to do that, some women figured, was to marry white and let the power of having Caucasian male authority at one’s side work its “charms.” Charmless though it might have been. Mollie even jokes with Ernest that she’s well-aware he’s a coyote, after her money. And, appropriately, the movie opens with the Osage elders lamenting the next generation’s seemingly blithe “conversion” to whiteness. Having lost all sense of their heritage with this mixing of their blood with a race so prone to subjugation and erasing all other cultures to fit in with the mold of their own. Among the most memorable scenes to emphasize this “conversion” of the new generation—the one that has benefited from their headrights inheritances—occurs after seeing the elders lament the loss of their culture. Viewers are then presented with the sight of the younger generation gleefully and greedily dancing in shirtless slow motion as oil gushes from the ground, covering them in more symbolic wealth. This shift in ideals from those of pure, nature-oriented and -respecting ones to cold, hollow capitalistic ones demarcates the notion that Native Americans were finally being “modernized,” brought into the twentieth century, as it were. As though that was the “right” and “generous” thing for white men to “facilitate” (read: foist).
At the same time, white men never really wanted Native Americans (or any people of color) to get “too modern.” In other words, they still wanted them to remain powerless and dependent, subject to the unjust systems set up to benefit whites and punish or subdue anybody else. Not just that, but to debase or belittle any success they did manage to carve out for themselves. Hence, the constant running commentary among white men in Killers of the Flower Moon about how “these Indians” didn’t “work” for the money they have. That it was just luck and happenstance that bestowed them with such bounty. As though to say that the white men’s “work” of plundering the riches of others is far “nobler.”
And oh, how Osage wealth is plundered, as we see repeatedly throughout Killers of the Flower Moon. In fact, perhaps what’s most standout about the way the murders are committed is how they’re presented by Scorsese, interspersed throughout as “non sequitur” scenes designed to reveal just how callously and casually they’re done. With no feeling, no second thoughts whatsoever.
The film’s title plays into a metaphor for white oppression, with the book (written by David Grann) the movie is based on describing the phenomenon in nature it refers to as: “In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma… In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms… The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage… refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.” Obviously, the white man is represented by the larger blooms overtaking and suppressing the tiny ones, until they’re stamped out completely.
This is conveyed even in how the story of Mollie and the Osages who were killed ends up being overshadowed by white use of those stories for “entertainment” (as paraded in the final scene when the “tale” is being presented as a true crime radio show…how relevant to the present). Roth, a tour de force in screenplay adaptations (see also: Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Dune), assists in revealing the ouroboros of exploitation that goes on vis-à-vis the handling of the stories of the marginalized, with the audience watching Killers of the Flower Moon in the theater contributing to that endless cycle.
Scorsese, no stranger to showing his attraction for stories of indigenous exploitation, also harkens us back to his 1986 film, The Mission, with this latest behemoth. The Mission was described by James Shofield Saeger, a scholar of Spanish missions in the New World, as a “white European distortion of Native American reality.” There’s no doubt that, despite Scorsese’s assurance of consulting with the Osage tribe’s current chief, Standing Bear, throughout the making of the film, many will still take issue with a white man retelling this painful part of Osage history. Indeed, as is the case with the barrage of movies that come out about Black slavery, some Native Americans weren’t happy with the idea that, yet again, their only representation in cinema is that of their historical pain with Killers of the Flower Moon.
For example, Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs had plenty of criticism to lob at the film, stating, “Being Native, watching this movie was fucking hellfire… I can’t believe it needs to be said, but Indig ppl exist beyond our grief, trauma & atrocities. Our pride for being Native, our languages, cultures, joy & love are way more interesting & humanizing than showing the horrors white men inflicted on us… All the incredible Indigenous actors were the only redeeming factors of this film. Give Lily [Gladstone] her goddamn Oscar. But while all of the performances were strong, if you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.”
But what does one expect when you “let” a fox in the henhouse? A.k.a. submit to the constantly brushed-aside reality that, for BIPOC stories to be told at all, they must still somehow land in the hands of white people. Ergo, that ouroboros of exploitation constantly feeding on itself.
Genna Rivieccio
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