In Osage Communities, a Divided Reaction to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

After watching “Killers of the Flower Moon” at a July screening in Tulsa, Okla., Dana Bear emerged from the theater with a sophisticated mixture of feelings.

Bear, who’s an Osage artist and start employee, felt the horror of witnessing the murders of her individuals onscreen. But she additionally felt a way of deep aid: For years, Bear had instructed tales of these murders to her youngsters — tales of poisoned kinfolk and sleepless nights and charred houses — bearing the burden of that tragic historical past and passing it on to the subsequent technology.

“Now, we don’t have to carry these stories anymore,” she mentioned. “Now, the whole world knows what happened to us.”

Bear is one in all many Indigenous individuals who got here away deeply affected by Martin Scorsese’s searing movie, primarily based on the Twenties Reign of Terror in Oklahoma, when dozens of oil-rich Osage have been killed by their white neighbors. The murders have been a part of a large conspiracy led by William Hale, performed within the movie by Robert De Niro. Those he enlisted included his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a World War I veteran who married Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a rich Osage girl.

The movie, which garnered seven Golden Globes nominations on Monday, has divided Indigenous viewers: In a dozen interviews, a lot of them, notably members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, welcomed the film, applauding Scorsese for his meticulous portrayal of Osage tradition and noting the methods the critically acclaimed drama has broadened consciousness of the killings. But different Indigenous viewers mentioned the film was instructed from a white man’s perspective and lacked enough context in regards to the U.S. authorities’s complicity within the murders.

“It still felt to me like it was a story about the white men,” mentioned Tim Landes, who’s Cherokee and an editor for TulsaFolks journal. “It was still framed around the criminals who did the bad deeds.” He mentioned he wished the film had been created by an Indigenous artist.

“There are numerous Indigenous filmmakers, especially in Oklahoma, who are just anxiously awaiting their shot,” he mentioned.

There appears to be broad settlement in Indigenous circles that the drama succeeded in precisely portraying the tradition and language of the Osage individuals. Scorsese and his manufacturing group took nice pains to include Osage suggestions into the film, neighborhood members mentioned. In 2019, a number of years into the making of the film, Scorsese and his crew met with greater than 200 Osage individuals, discussing tribe members’ considerations in regards to the film and asking them questions on their lives.

“My position always was let’s make sure we’re not going to be stereotyped as Hollywood always does,” mentioned Geoffrey Standing Bear, principal chief of the Osage Nation. “Let’s make sure our story to be told by us as much as possible. And we did a good job of that. This was a movie where you hear the Osage language. You hear the sounds of our music.”

In an e mail to The New York Times, Scorsese mentioned, “We felt a great responsibility to get the story right and this is extremely sensitive territory for the Osage.”

The film was filmed in Osage County and Washington County, Okla., and all through manufacturing, Scorsese and his group labored with Osage consultants on clothes, language, artwork and extra. Many Osage individuals additionally acted as extras.

“The way that they were able to consult and really fold in the community gave it its authenticity,” mentioned Addie Roanhorse, who labored within the movie’s artwork division and is a direct descendant of Henry Roan. (Played by William Belleau, he’s depicted within the movie as having “melancholy” and is killed by one in all Hale’s henchmen.)

Scorsese, Gladstone and DiCaprio attended many tribal ceremonies to study extra about their traditions, mentioned Gigi Sieke, an Osage member who seems as an additional within the remaining scene. She remembers the manufacturing group going to her grandfather’s 100-year-old home to measure his desk and study the antiques he owned. When she first watched the film, she was amazed by how carefully the movie mirrored the customs of her individuals, from the best way they prayed to the trivia of their clothes.

Still, it was typically painful to observe the movie. Dana Bear mentioned she was depressed for a month after the screening, saddened by the truth of how Osage members had been brutally handled.

Growing up, Bear remembered, she noticed an aged man, recognized to her as “Cowboy,” at grocery shops or fuel stations in Fairfax, Okla. It was not till watching the film that it dawned on her that he was the son of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart.

“It’s not the distant past,” she mentioned. “My grandma lived through that. A lot of families left during that time out of fear and you can look around and see where those families left.”

While most of the Indigenous individuals interviewed authorised of the movie, others mentioned it didn’t reckon with the methods the murders had been enabled by the federal authorities’s systematic oppression of Indigenous individuals.

The movie might have included higher context about how the murders weren’t remoted occasions however a part of a broader historical past of colonization, mentioned Elizabeth Rule, a Chickasaw Nation member and a professor of important race, gender and tradition research at American University.

“Violence against Indigenous people unfolded in a systematic way across additional communities in different parts of the country,” she mentioned.

The film additionally shied away from the federal authorities’s historical past of capturing Native American land via the allotment system, making it simpler for the properties to be transferred to white males, mentioned Robert Warrior, an Osage professor of American literature and tradition on the University of Kansas.

Other critics say that the movie centered the attitude of white males fairly than that of Mollie and different Osage individuals, and that the story might have been higher instructed by an Indigenous filmmaker.

“It would take an Osage to tell the story from the Osage perspective,” mentioned Joel Robinson, an Osage member from Kentucky who wrote a viral overview of the film on Letterboxd. “Someone who has never had to come at it from a place of learning and discovery. Someone who has had it embedded in them.”

The fault lies with an leisure business that continues to raise white individuals’s inventive selection over these of Indigenous filmmakers, he mentioned. “In the current Hollywood system, there’s no shot that the studio would come in and be like, ‘Oh you’re Osage, do you want to make this movie? Here’s $200 million,’” he mentioned, referring to the reported funds of the movie.

Scorsese took difficulty with the competition that “Killers” elevates a white man’s perspective over an Indigenous one. “I can’t really agree that the story is told primarily from a white man’s perspective,” Scorsese mentioned. “I wanted to create a kind of panoramic perspective. There are many interwoven characters and strands in the story. The majority of the white characters are swindlers, thieves and murderers. That includes Ernest and Bill, of course. I think the picture really isn’t from their ‘perspective.’”

But Jeremy Charles, a Cherokee filmmaker, mentioned the film reminded him how a lot progress was nonetheless wanted to enhance Indigenous illustration in cinema.

“We’re telling these kinds of stories predominantly through a white colonizer lens is the main issue,” he mentioned. “What I’ve been working on and what many Indigenous filmmakers have been working on is getting more stories told from an Indigenous perspective into the mainstream.”

“The world,” he mentioned, “is hungry for our stories.”