The thought of sitting through Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour long movie based on David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI does not excite me, but I have no problem with reading for hours, so I bought the book instead. Killers of the Flower Moon is an especially fascinating non-fiction account of an incredibly dark period of early 20th century American history known by the Osage as the “Reign of Terror”. I think this is the type of book that true crime aficionados will eat up, and it also provides an important lesson on the history of white people’s treatment of indigenous peoples.

The Osage are a group of indigenous people who used to live in a huge territory of land along the Mississippi River that stretched across what is present day Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, before they were essentially forced to give up their lands by the US government. The Osage bought their own reservation located in the north-east corner of Oklahoma, and, very importantly, they were able to retain the mineral rights on their reservation. They eventually discovered oil underneath their land and became millionaires by leasing their mineral rights to oil companies. By the 1920s, the period of time that Killers of the Flower Moon focuses on, the Osage were the richest people in the world, and of course, white people did not like the idea of a bunch of Indians having so much money. The US government passed a law deeming the Osage not competent enough to handle their own affairs and they were required to have a guardian, a white man, who dictated how they could spend their money. The oil boom on Osage territory resulted in all kinds of unscrupulous white people flocking there to swindle the Osage out of their money.

A central figure depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon – both the book and the movie – is an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart. Mollie, like every other member of Osage Nation, owned a headright to a parcel of their land, including the mineral rights underneath that parcel of land. The headrights could not be bought or sold; they could only be inherited through blood or through marriage. Members of Mollie’s family began dying under questionable circumstances, or by outright murder, in a short period of time. Other members of Osage Nation were being murdered as well. Mollie was married to Ernest Burkhart, a white man whose uncle was William Hale, another white man who settled on Osage territory. William Hale was known as the “King of the Osage Hills”, and he even called himself a “friend of the Osage”.

J. Edgar Hoover, the director of what is now known as the FBI, sent some of his agents to investigate the Osage murders. These agents uncovered a conspiracy by white perpetrators to murder the Osage for their money and their headrights. Mollie’s family was targeted so that Mollie would end up inheriting all of their headrights. But the FBI investigated only a handful of the murders and called it day after they thought they got the men responsible for all the murders. However, decades later, David Grann does his own investigating and discovers that the conspiracy against the Osage was a lot more insidious and went on for a lot longer than was originally believed. I thought I could no longer be surprised by the evilness of white people, but Killers of the Flower Moon has proved me wrong.

Grann has done an incredible job investigating and bringing back into the public consciousness this shameful piece of American history, and he proves to be very sensitive to the affect that the Reign of Terror has had on the Osage. Members of the Osage Nation who are alive today continue to live with the trauma of knowing that their family members were murdered by greedy white people.