As Martin Scorsese's latest epic Killers of the Flower Moon, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, is released this week, Caryn James explores the terrible true history that inspired the film.
"They won't remember", Robert De Niro's character says in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. As the real-life William Hale, a cattle baron in 1920s Oklahoma, he is deluded in thinking that the Osage Nation would move past the memory that dozens of their members who had become rich from oil rights were systematically killed for their money.
Like the book, the film is extraordinary in the way it captures both Mollie's intense personal story and the cultural prejudice that fostered the crimes. In the early 1920s, William Hale was a powerful force in Osage County, a venal man who regarded Native Americans as less than human while pretending to be the tribe's friend and benefactor. Hale encourages his equally greedy nephew, the World War One veteran Ernest Burkhart to marry Mollie.
Scorsese's film, using mock archival newsreels, depicts the baffled resentment with which white society regarded the wealthy Osage being driven by chauffeurs, and Native women dressed in fashionable furs and jewels. Mollie herself wore a traditional blanket as a coat and lived a simple life even though she had a large house and servants.
William Hale was a cattle baron in 1920s Oklahoma who befriended the Osage, while covertly plotting to kill them , contemporaneous with the Osage murders, in which a prosperous black neighbourhood called Black Wall Street was burned to the ground by a white mob.
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