David Grann, staff writer for The New Yorker, was a National Book Award finalist for chronicling the immense conspiracy of the racially driven Osage murders in Letterboxd member Martin Scorsese, starring his two most important muses, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. This collection of American film industry titans meant that the eyes and ears granted to the story would be worldwide. Although this horror would be new information for most of the crime epic’s audience, it is nothing new to the Osage.

Scorsese’s adaptation of Grann’s book famously shifted perspective when DiCaprio wanted to play one of the main villains instead of the lead FBI investigator. With DiCaprio eyeing the role of Ernest Burkhart, the script opened up the floor to Ernest’s wife, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), and Grann encouraged more input from Osage elders and historians, whom he’d worked closely with for the five years of writing his book, and his subsequent years of revisiting the Osage Nation after its publication.

As Chief Standing Bear told me in a roundtable interview (which you can hear in the podcast above): “We greatly respected the way David Grann put his skills to a well-researched book and the way he met with our elders in getting their trust. He took some time to do that, and we were comfortable with what came out.”

He continues: “This is a story we all knew about, but few talked about. So, [with the film’s announcement] we were concerned that once again, somebody else would be telling our story.” Chief Standing Bear, seated next to Scorsese, said, “It was a process of building trust, like David [Grann] did.”

Scorsese, at the same roundtable, responded with immense cultural curiosity and involved the modern Osage in much of the movie’s production. “The first thing we had to do is to be accurate, or as authentic as we can be, true to the Osage themselves,” he explained. “So, that meant every possible aspect of every scene with the Osage had to be [worked on] with many different, wonderful people who were able to help us from the Osage Nation. From making tapestries, to the woodwork to the artwork, the hair, the blankets… Every detail was worked that way with the Osage, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute,” Scorsese recalls of the shoot, which often included new pages for the script, being written with the Osage involvement, during filming.

In the interview below, Grann elaborates on some of the Reign of Terror’s more damning history, providing contextual details for those who haven’t read his book (yet) and recommending a selection of Osage texts that continue the conversation.

There was a panoramic photograph on the wall, which was taken in 1923 or 1924. It showed of the Osage Nation standing along with white settlers. It looked very innocent, but a portion of that photograph was missing. I asked the museum director, Kathryn Red Corn, what had happened to it. She said it contained this figure so frightening she had decided to remove it. She pointed at that missing and she said, “The devil was standing right there.”

She went down into the basement; she brought up an image of the missing , and it showed one of the killers of of the Osage Nation during the Reign of Terror. And I was very, very haunted by that image, because I kept thinking the Osage had removed that photograph not to forget what had happened but because they can’t forget. Yet so many Americans, including myself, had never learned this history. We had excised it from our consciousness and even our conscience. It’s very rare that a book has an origin story, but this really was the origin story. In many ways, I embarked to address my own ignorance.

Martin Scorsese has said openly about how much the adaptation changed over the years, and how it moved away from the story of the formation of the FBI. Your book is framed a little bit like a whodunit. That oversimplifies a little, because it’s very, very layered, but when the shift of the film adaptation moved more to Mollie and Ernest, were you involved in any type of way to fill in the areas that weren’t in your book, but might’ve been in your research?
Yeah, it’s a triptych, the book. It’s told from three points of view. The first point of view is the Osage point of view, their history. It’s anchored in Mollie’s experiences, her history—as much as possible—and the records and her relationship with Ernest.

The second perspective is told from the FBI investigator [Tom White, played in the film by Jesse Plemons]. They’re investigating these murders, in particular the murders of Mollie’s family, and you see it through one of the investigator’s eyes. Then the third perspective, which I think in some ways is the most important part of the book, is told from the present from many of the descendants, including Mollie’s descendants. It really shows how there was this much deeper and darker conspiracy that the FBI never exposed.

This is very much this point which Marty has made, which I think is the correct point to make: this was less a story about who did it than who didn’t do it. I use those words in the book, too. It really was about this culture of killing and this culture of complicity, and that many people were in on it. Doctors were in on it, morticians were in on it, businessmen were in on it.

I never saw the first script, and so what I know about the first script is really only what I’ve read. But when DiCaprio reached out to me and said he was thinking of switching roles [from Tom White] and he wanted to play Ernest Burkhart, I said, “Well, if I were you, I would do that.” Ernest is a very important figure because Ernest represents how these crimes take place. He’s this kind of ordinary human; he’s not a sociopath.

I think that’s what’s important: he’s not the singular evil figure. He’s somebody who has a conscience, who has—from the record—some genuine affection for Mollie. Yet, he’s still willing to go along with these crimes. If you can crack the riddle of Ernest, you get to help understand what lies at the systematic nature of these crimes, because [they] require what I call willing executioners: the people who open the doors and the people who go along with it.

I had some letters that Ernest had written and that Mollie had written to Ernest. I had oral histories, which I had taken from Mollie’s family . I had interviews with some of the descendants of Ernest and Hale, the killers. I even [had] a video recording of Ernest as an old man. So I shared that with Mr. DiCaprio when he was interested in playing that role so he could get a sense of him and his diction and the way he spoke. That was kind of my function. But you know, that relationship and the way they develop is really just a credit to them… Because as a historian, you’re limited. You are constricted by the underlying materials. They’re gonna create scenes and imagine scenes between them, but I think what they did so well is that—based on the records that we do know—they capture the essential truths of that relationship.

They were eventually confined to a reservation in Kansas in the 1860s, where once more they were under siege and there was a massacre. Under duress, they agreed to sell their land. They were looking for a new homeland, and they eyed a territory that was then an Indian territory, what is today Oklahoma. It was an area about the size of Delaware. It was rocky and infertile, so most whites considered it worthless, which is why an Osage chief at the time had stood up and said, “Our people should move there because the white people will finally leave us alone.”

So they relocated there. By then, the diseases and the massacres and the forced migrations had taken a tremendous toll on the Osage. The numbers had dwindled to just a few thousand, a fraction of what they had been. Then, not to tell too much history, their communal ownership of the land was broken up in the early 1900s.

This is important to understand if you want to understand the movie and what happened, what lay at the heart of these crimes. When the Osage were negotiating the , when their land was being allotted, they inserted into their treaty a rather curious provision, which said they would maintain all the subsurface mineral rights to their land. At that time, nobody thought the Osage were sitting on a fortune of oil.

After the reservation was allotted and broken up, much of the surface territory disappeared into the hands of whites. But the Osage continued to maintain control of this area underneath the land. Each Osage on the tribal roll, about 2,000 or so, was given a headright, which was essentially a share in this mineral trust. This is what’s so important: a headright could not be bought or sold. It could only be inherited.

So, even as the surface land disappeared in the hands of whites, the Osage continued to maintain control of this vast area the size of Delaware beneath the land itself. They had become the world’s first underground reservation. And then, of course, these vast sums of oil were developed. As the Osage became wealthier and wealthier, it provoked an insidious backlash across the country. of the US Congress went so far as to legislation requiring many Osage to have white guardians to manage their fortunes.

This was not abstractly racist; it was literally racist. It was based on the quantum of Osage blood, so if you were a half-blooded or full-blooded Osage, you were given one of these guardians and you were deemed “incompetent.” You’ll hear that phrase a lot in the film. “Mollie Burkhart, incompetent.” That’s what the government would deem them, to control them. Then you were given a white guardian, who would suddenly tell you whether you could get this toothpaste or, you know, this car. Not only was it a racist system, it was a system that ushered in widespread corruption as many of the guardians began to swindle and embezzle millions of dollars from the Osage.

It is appalling to think that at this very moment, where we have this opportunity to learn about this history and to fill in some of our blank spaces in our memories, there are efforts even in Oklahoma that lead to what I would call “soft censorship”, because the laws are so vaguely written. Teachers are afraid of causing any discomfort. I spoke to one Oklahoma teacher who told me that she didn’t know if she could refer to the Osage murderers as white or if she had to referer to them as settlers. I said, “Well, they were white.” So, this battle and struggle of our history is still going on. It’s one that’s really important. Why do I say that? Because it’s foolhardy to think you can completely erase history.

History is there in the sense that the antecedents ended up shaping the generations that come. The question is, do you let negative history fester and continue, or do you look back on history—both the stirring, but also the cautionary—to learn how to shape it, to be the kind of people you wanna be in the future? I really do hope that we teach this history.

To your point about the film industry, film and history are not one in the same. It’s important that we continue to make those distinctions so that we don’t completely conflate them. But what a film like Killers of the Flower Moon—which is so authentic and gets at these deeper truths and is really faithful to the broader history—does is help us learn and bring awareness about this history. Most importantly, what I think its role should be is to begin a conversation. That conversation is what should lead you to read Osage writers, read about Osage history, to read about other Native American history, to begin to have these discussions about our past. If that comes out of this, that will be the best thing.

I also recommend reading Osage poet Elise Paschen. She is the daughter of Maria Tallchief, the Osage ballerina. And I’ll end with one last one, which is a friend of mine, Dennis McAuliffe, who wrote a really superb memoir called The Deaths of Sybil Bolton, [about] his own investigation into the mysterious deaths of one of his descendants.