‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and Why Native Stories Should Be Told by Native Filmmakers (Commentary)

Martin Scorsese is a master and his latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” tells the story of the Osage murders of the 1920s. It’s an incredible piece of cinema in many ways, but Scorsese’s talent and craftsmanship can only take this story so far. At the end of the day, “Killers of the Flower Moon” captures a tragic chapter of Native American history on the Osage Nation involving Osage people, but is still told by white men, from the perspective of white men, instead of from Natives.

While this is arguably a positive step in the right direction — that this harrowing story was picked up by an iconic director who is giving it mainstream attention at all is noteworthy — the next step needs to be Native storytellers telling our stories and presenting them to global audiences with an equitable platform.

When Scorsese took on this project in 2017, an adaptation of David Grann’s book of the same name, alongside lead actor and executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio, the excitement was palpable. A famed director. A proven actor. An intriguing, if devastating, story of “forgotten” U.S. history about when the Osage people discovered oil on their land and become the wealthiest per capita people in the world only to have white people marry them, kill them and take their “headrights.”

Among many Native Americans, myself included as an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee Nations who grew up in Oklahoma, this twist of fate seemed to be a promising door opening. Scorsese himself recognized these tragic money-minded murders as an important story to tell, and the American masses and beyond would finally know the truth thanks to him.

For too many years our history books have silenced our stories. As someone who grew up in Oklahoma, I was never taught in school about the Osage murders or the Tulsa Race Massacre. Learning about those events came from family, as my Native mother drove me around the Greenwood district of Tulsa as a child to show me where Black Tulsans were murdered and what could have been. It’s honestly wild to know that these two tragedies were happening at about the same time in the same state — a detail Scorsese makes clear in his film.

But after seeing “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I am convinced that a Native director telling this truth from the Native perspective would have been the best path to authenticity. While Scorsese opened the door — even realizing mid-development that there needed to be more Osage focus and involvement — it’s not enough.

For a film that spotlights a wretched time in U.S. and Oklahoma history, when words like “guardians” and “incompetent” flowed so freely, referring to white “managers” of people and their money taken away from perfectly competent Natives, respectively, isn’t that ironically what this movie is cautioning against? White people speaking for Natives? Telling our stories from their perspectives? In 2023, it’s time to pass the collective baton.

K. Devery Jacobs (Mohawk), who starred in the Native-led and created series “Reservation Dogs,” even spoke to this in an X thread this week, where she said that watching this movie as a Native “was fucking hellfire.”

“But while all of the performances were strong,” she wrote, “if you look proportionally, each of the Osage characters felt painfully underwritten, while the white men were given way more courtesy and depth.” Would this have happened if a Native director told this story?

The “heart of the movie,” as mentioned by multiple critics, is the dynamic lead actress Lily Gladstone (Siksikaitsitapi/Nimíipuu), who stars as Mollie Burkhart (née Kyle), an Osage woman whose mother and sisters die one after the other. After marrying the white nephew of the murderous mastermind (Robert De Niro), she becomes extremely ill while receiving insulin “treatment” from her supposedly loving yet equally murderous husband (DiCaprio).

How different would this movie have been had it been from Mollie’s perspective, using more details of discovery from Grann’s book when she learns of one sister being shot and another sister dying in a mysterious explosion? Instead, we have the malignant machinations of DiCaprio’s Ernest and his uncle driving the story.

As Christopher Cote, an Osage language consultant on the film, said at the film’s premiere earlier this month, “As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced, but I think it would take an Osage to do that. … Martin Scorsese, not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart and they kind of give him this conscience and kind of depict that there’s love. But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love. That’s not love, that’s just beyond abuse.”

Early in the film, when De Niro’s character William Hale is trying to convince Ernest that it would benefit him and his white family to marry into an Osage family, he tells his nephew that the Osage “don’t talk much” — a common misconception about Natives in general.

We do talk. A lot. In fact, a week before the official Oc. 20 opening, Native-led social justice org IllumiNative hosted its inaugural Indigenous House in Los Angeles, spotlighting Native trailblazers including Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee (Creek)) of “Reservation Dogs” fame and Jhane Myers (Comanche/Blackfeet), who produced the film “Prey.” Those are just two Native creatives who have changed the narrative of television and film by telling Native stories from an Indigenous perspective.

Seeing Natives from so many Nations gather in one place to celebrate their fellow creatives was inspiring and fulfilling. Seeing the laughter, the support, the teasing, the talking and community reminded me of our power and potential.

“Hollywood just can’t go on telling stories about us, without us, and coming in and mining our stories and mining our trauma,” Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), IllumiNative’s founder and CEO, told TheWrap. “And that has been the model over and over again.”

She added, “Tribes need to have a seat at the table. We need to have people from those communities where the stories are being told, being the writers, the directors, really involved.”

Not only that, but the Cherokee Nation this summer introduced its newly expanded film commission, an endeavor led by Senior Director Jennifer Loren. With campaigns using the hashtag #MoreNatives, Loren and her team have championed Native stories to be filmed on the Nation in Oklahoma, in production facilities built and run by Cherokees on Cherokee land.

We are succeeding in telling these much-needed Native stories and giving Natives more opportunities to use their voice on a broader scale. But, as Hale tells Ernest, time passes and people stop caring — if they ever did to begin with. It is time for a “reckoning.” Scorsese’s telling of the Osage “Reign of Terror” is a meaningful step, but a step nonetheless.

This history is real and still reverberates with Indigenous people. In fact, this moment in time wasn’t so long ago. I still have the paperwork declaring my full-blooded Creek grandma as competent, a distinction that had less to do with her mental capacity than with her land allotment. I still have the pictures of my mom at a Native boarding school. I still have my own government-issued card telling me just how much “Indian blood” I have.

We Native people have our own stories that only we can tell. Not as mere consultants but as true storytellers. And unlike that dehumanizing misconception that’s informed even modern media, we do talk, we do laugh, we eat, we cry, we sing, and we mourn. After all, we are still here. And we care.

Let’s give Native voices the opportunity to show audiences why they should care, too.

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