‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and Scorsese’s Bride Like No Other

For weddings a century in the past, Swan stated, “they would give away 50 or 60 heads of horse, feed 400 or 500 people for a week.” In one account from 1932, in Hominy, Okla., the daddy of the bride purchased 5 new Chevrolet roadsters and gave them away, Swan added. “He said he spent some $50,000 on that wedding” — over $1 million in immediately’s {dollars}.

That degree of festivity was typically reserved for the eldest sons or daughters of a household, throughout the period of organized marriages, and was restricted primarily to full-blooded Osage, like Mollie Kyle. (It would have been unlikely for an Osage lady marrying a white man, as she does within the film, Swan identified — however that was Scorsese’s artistic license.)

The scene is a second of lightness in a narrative that’s in any other case wrenching. In his ebook, Grann writes that there have been in all probability far, much more deaths than the 24 that the F.B.I. arrived to unravel.

O’Keefe grew up in Pawhuska, Okla., the capital of Osage lands. “Everybody has a connection to the story,” she stated. “There isn’t a district that doesn’t, because everybody within our communities lost someone, our family members, due to strange circumstances.”

The wedding ceremony coats are one emblem from that point that has been rewoven repeatedly; after World War II, they had been worn on the Osage’s conventional summer season neighborhood dance, as an alternative of at weddings. It’s a uncommon and vivid instance of a historic garment that attains cultural longevity, Swan stated, whereas additionally being “recharted.”

At a current dance, there have been six or eight “bridesmaids,” O’Keefe stated, “dressed in all these different wedding coats and hats, that were all given away to families.”

Each lady solely will get one outing with a coat. In a dance that has hardly modified for greater than a century, it’s a deeply symbolic second, Shaw Duty famous. “People will always remember who wore them, who made them,” she stated. “It’s all our own little Osage world, going on here, and it fills us with happiness.”