Killers of the Flower Moon

[Steve Carlton]

There's also The Fatal Shore, about the founding of Australia by the Brits. It's a good (long) read.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Originally Posted by stevej37

^^^ I'll report back after I see the movie.
I've never seen a movie with Leonardo in it that I didn't like....he seems to really be choosy about his roles.

I'm looking forward to your review.

[GH85Carrera]

One point of data most don't understand how much money was generated by the "head right" of the oil wells. There was more money in the oil than ALL of the gold ever mined in the west. Every man woman and child was receiving the equivalent of 400K per person. So a family of four had 1.6 million per year! That much money brought in all the crooks and they were willing to kill to get the money.

[bob deluke]

If you want to see a great documentary watch “The Buffalo” by Ken Burns on PBS. Sad and depressing what happened to the millions of Buffalo and resulting starvation of indigenous people. There were really ignorant politicians way back then who thought they were doing the right things for all the wrong reasons. Another winner for Ken Burns.

[stevej37]

Some good reading and watching choices above.
I think I have seen 'The Buffalo" a few years back...worth a re-watch I'm sure.

[Tobra]

Originally Posted by Steve Carlton

I’d like to learn something about this history.

I could send you the book if you like

[Steve Carlton]

That's a kind and generous offer. If you want to do it, PM me and I'll send you my address and I'll reimburse you for the postage.

[bob deluke]

Steve,
The documentary by Ken Burns, “The American Buffalo” was just released this October. It’s new on PBS. Great story.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

^^^ I saw that Bob after my donation to the local station, looking forward to it now.

[stevej37]

^^^ Thanks.
I see it is on Prime also.

[Steve Carlton]

Originally Posted by bob deluke

Steve,
The documentary by Ken Burns, “The American Buffalo” was just released this October. It’s new on PBS. Great story.

I'll check it out. Sad how they got nearly wiped out.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

I was going to post about this from personal experience, that is the U.S. history we learn and the history we don't but got sidetracked and forgot about it. But in today's NYTimes, there is an interesting opinion piece by Jim Gray and David Grann.


My own editorial
There's a lot of U.S. history we aren't taught, mostly due to white male hegemony, which is sadly the opposite of how Germans are taught about their country's role in WW2. We'd be a better country with fewer social and cultural ills if we were taught all U.S. history, what we did right and what we did wrong. Having won the Bee County Texas History award in 10th grade, in part by finding two errors on the test, I have always been interested in and fascinated by history itself and in more recent years, how it's taught. Things like the Trail of Tears, The Tulsa Massacre and the Osage were never taught in school. It makes you wonder what we don't know. And how the country might be different if we did.

The opinion piece is definitely worth the read.

Mr. Gray is a former Osage chief whose great-grandfather was killed during the Reign of Terror. Mr. Grann is a journalist and the author of the book “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The True Story Behind ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Is Being Erased From Oklahoma Classrooms

Oct. 20, 2023

During the early 20th century, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were systematically murdered by white settlers. Yet outside the Osage Nation, the history of this racial injustice — one of the worst in American history — was distorted and then largely erased from memory.

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” a film directed by Martin Scorsese, shines an extraordinary light on these events and provides a long overdue opportunity to restore them in our consciousness. But ironically, at the same time that the film is being released, there is a new attempt to suppress the teaching of this very history in the state where it took place.

In 2021 the Oklahoma Legislature passed a bill prohibiting teachers in public school from instructing several concepts, including that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race or sex. The vagueness of the law has caused teachers to censor themselves, for fear of losing their licenses or their school’s accreditation. In a high school classroom in Dewey, Okla., copies of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the nonfiction book behind the film, were left unread because the teacher worried about running afoul of the law. Another teacher confessed that she was uncertain if she could refer to the settlers who murdered the Osage as white.

At stake in these fights is not only factual accuracy. It is also how new generations will be taught to record and remember the past — both the good and the bad — so that they can learn to make their own history.

The story of what’s now called the Osage Reign of Terror is essential to understanding America’s past. After vast oil deposits were discovered under their lands, the Osage were suddenly, by the 1920s, among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. In the year 1923 alone, the roughly 2,000 Osage on the tribal roll received a total of more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.

As their wealth increased, though, it unleashed an insidious backlash across the country. The U.S. government passed legislation requiring many Osage to have white guardians to manage their fortunes — a system that was both abhorrently racist and widely corrupt. Then the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances: There were shootings, poisonings and even a bombing.

After the official death toll reached at least 24, the Osage Tribal Council issued a resolution demanding that federal authorities investigate. The case was taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1926 an undercover team of operatives finally caught a flamboyantly brutal killer and two of his henchmen. The bureau’s young director, J. Edgar Hoover, promptly closed the case, and the story of how his men had triumphantly ended the Reign of Terror by apprehending the mastermind became the widely accepted version of events.

Yet there was a much deeper and darker conspiracy that the bureau never exposed.

Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau. The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.

It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.” The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24. One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”

The Osage had these events seared in their memories. Yet most Americans had excised even the bureau’s sanitized account from their consciences. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred during the same period, the Osage Reign of Terror was generally not taught in schools, even in Oklahoma. Mary Jo Webb, an Osage schoolteacher, once placed in her public library in Fairfax, Okla., a paper she’d written on the murders, but someone, she said, quietly removed it. The victims’ history, along with their lives, had been rubbed out. And even now, as their stories are being dramatized in a movie and shown in theaters across the country, there is a campaign in Oklahoma — this time with legislation — to deter the history from being taught in schools.

Last year the Osage Nation Congress unanimously passed a resolution calling for repealing the Oklahoma law that bars teaching the concept that students should feel psychological distress on account of their race. “Teachers are scared to speak the truth about what’s happened,” said Eli Potts, who was elected to the Osage Nation Congress in 2018. “I personally have had schools and I know of others who had Osage individuals who were scheduled to speak on ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ rescind those offers because of this bill. We owe it to those before us to speak the truth,” he continued, “regardless of how uncomfortable it makes you feel, because it’s the truth.”

It’s not just Osage history that is being threatened. Other tribal nations in Oklahoma have joined the Osage in seeking the law’s repeal, warning that it undermines accurate learning about their own pasts. And in Bixby, Okla., a public school canceled a lesson plan that focused on “Dreamland Burning,” a young adult novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

The movement to suppress elements of American history extends well beyond Oklahoma. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, more than two dozen states have adopted laws that make it easier to remove books from school libraries and to prevent certain teaching on race, gender and sexuality. In 2023, PEN America, which defends freedom of speech, reported that book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries had surged 33 percent over the previous school year, with more than 3,000 recorded removals; among them are classics by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (banned in 30 school districts) and Margaret Atwood (banned in 34). School curriculums are being revised to mask discomfiting truths — so much so that in Florida students will now be taught that some African Americans benefited from slavery because it gave them “skills.”

After the world premiere of “Killers of the Flower Moon” at the Cannes Film Festival, Matt Pinnell, Oklahoma’s lieutenant governor and a Republican, encouraged audiences to see the movie. (His state had even provided financial incentives for the production.) A reporter asked him why, if people from around the world should watch the film, the subject can’t be taught without fear in Oklahoma’s public schools. Though he acknowledged a need to clarify the law, in the five months since the festival, the state legislature has not done so.

If such policies continue, new generations of Americans will be deprived of the wisdom of history — all of history: the stirring, the cautionary, the truth. As Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. put it, Oklahomans cannot “move forward unless we understand how we got here.”

The same is true for all of us.

[stevej37]

^^^ Interesting stuff.
Never a mention of this when I was in HS or College. (And that was in the early 70's.)

[gacook]

We learned about pretty much all those events when I was coming up in school...80s/90s.

[Steve Carlton]

Man's seemingly unlimited capacity for cruelty to man saddens me. So here's another example that happened right on our own turf.

[stevej37]

^^^ Where at?
I'm just wondering if being in MI was part of the reason. (for me)

[gacook]

Originally Posted by stevej37

^^^ Where at?
I'm just wondering if being in MI was part of the reason. (for me)

Arizona. A "good school."

[stevej37]

^^^ My first six years of school were in a two-room country school.
I only had two diff teachers in that time...lol

[gacook]

Originally Posted by stevej37

^^^ My first six years of school were in a two-room country school.
I only had two diff teachers in that time...lol

Wow! I've visited "historic" schools like that (there are several around Arizona's small towns) but always had a hard time imagining learning (or worse, teaching) in that environment.

I was "blessed" that I lived in a decent area and had good public schools available to me where I grew up. Unfortunately, Arizona's education system has really gone downhill. We're one of the worst in the country now.

[stevej37]

^^^ I was fortunate to have an excellent teacher for the first four of those years....I have no regrets.

The only bad part was..exposure to new students. With about 8 kids in each class...I followed the same kids for each year.