Chris Klimek Host, “There’s More to That”
In 2019, Martin Scorsese—one of America’s most celebrated filmmakers—had a completed draft screenplay adapting David Grann’s nonfiction best seller Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. He had a pair of stars in his longtime collaborators Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. And he had a studio prepared to cover the film’s $200 million projected budget. A true-life saga involving organized crime, racial prejudice and evolving American identity, the material seemed at first glance like a perfect fit for the director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Departed and dozens of other acclaimed films.
When Jim Gray, a former chief of the Osage Nation, and other Osage leaders invited the filmmaker to Oklahoma to hear their concerns about his new project, Scorsese came. Scorsese listened. And then he rewrote and reconfigured Killers of the Flower Moon from soup to nuts, with a result that has earned a rapturous response from Native American viewers like Gray and journalist Sandra Hale Schulman, and from the broader critical community, too. The movie opens in theaters this Friday and will appear on the Apple TV+ streaming service before the end of the year.
In this episode of the Smithsonian magazine podcast “There’s More to That,” Schulman walks me through a brief history of how Native Americans have been depicted in a century’s worth of movies. Then, Gray tells me about his personal connection to Killers of the Flower Moon, the pattern of Native American erasure from national discourse, and how he and his colleagues persuaded Scorsese to rethink the new movie. A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the OceanGate Titan disaster, the history of book banning in America and more, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chris Klimek: Here is a long, sad story: In the late 1800s, the U.S. government forced the Osage people off their land in Kansas and relocated them to what was called Indian Territory. This place is now the state of Oklahoma. The government put the Osage there because the land was thought to be worthless, but it turns out it had oil. Suddenly, many Osage families were wildly rich. White outsiders took notice of this wealth, and they wanted it. By the 1920s, the “Reign of Terror” had begun. Osage were cheated out of their money, and several dozen were murdered. The deaths were the subject of a major criminal investigation by a young government agency, now known as the FBI. But most of the murders were either misreported or went unsolved. In the middle of all this, Henry Roan was born. Here’s James Roan Gray, who goes by “Jim.” Henry was his great-grandfather.
Jim Gray: I’m not only the great-grandson of Henry Roan. My mom chose to name me Roan in my middle name, named after her little brother, who died as an infant, and named after her grandfather, who was murdered during that same decade. And so I grew up kind of carrying this story.
Klimek: This story is now a movie called Killers of the Flower Moon. The death of Henry Roan is part of the plot. It’s directed by Martin Scorsese, based on a book by journalist David Grann. And it tells the story of the Reign of Terror and the subsequent FBI involvement. When Jim learned this would be a big-budget Hollywood film, he was concerned. So was his entire community.
Gray: It was collectively on our minds, because nobody knew whether or not they were just going to follow the same path that other moviemakers have made when it came to making Native-themed movies.
Klimek: Jim Gray is a former chief of the Osage Nation. He was one of several Osage who reached out to Scorsese, wanting him to hear their perspective on this story, which is how the following meeting happened between him and the filmmaker.
Gray: We had a large receiving line of all the Osages that were in the room, and he went through with his entourage and shook everybody’s hand in the whole room, which probably took about 45 minutes to do, because there were about 150 of us in the room. Each us had a chance to say a few words. I had a few words to say about the fact that the three biggest movie blockbusters, by the terms of your industry, that had a Native theme were Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans and Little Big Man. And all three of these stories have something in common. One is that they require a white person to tell the story and save the day. Two, they require a white writer to write a story of fiction.
Klimek: We’ll find out later in this episode how this meeting entirely changed the focus of Killers of the Flower Moon, but it also got us thinking about the entire history of how Native Americans have been portrayed on film and who gets to tell the stories that become blockbusters. From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is “There’s More to That,” a show where we talk about the real stories behind Hollywood hits. On this episode: From old westerns to Killers of the Flower Moon, what has changed, and why is it so important for us to find out? I’m Chris Klimek. Let’s get started.
Klimek: Before we go back to Jim, let’s take a second to talk about the history of Native Americans in the movies. Sandra Hale Schulman recently wrote about Native American representation in Hollywood for Smithsonian magazine. Sandra is part Cherokee and also a film producer herself.
Sandra Hale Schulman: Going back to the ’50s, there was a slew of movies made, particularly with John Wayne, that were just horrible representation, and just showing Natives as hostiles and savages and just people to be attacked and wiped out. The white savior. And the Manifest Destiny, which outlined that this is what’s going to happen: White people, the Europeans, and the settlers are going to move across the country. This is what’s meant to happen, and nothing’s going to stand in their way. And it turned into just a mass genocide. So the films were reflecting that. It’s just staggering. They got away with that, and nobody questioned it for a really long time.
Klimek: And not only were narratives like this pervasive, but it was also rare to see an actual Native American actor in a Native American role.
Schulman: Most of the Natives were played by Italians, and they were just putting makeup and wigs on them. And their excuse was, “Well, there were no Native actors available.” That’s not true. They just were simply not looking for them or letting them in the films.
Klimek: Sandra said that eventually things started to shift in a slightly better direction during the civil rights movement.
Schulman: The consciousness-raising really started in the ’60s. I think it had to do with the Voting Rights Act, that gave everyone the right to vote, which they shockingly didn’t have. African Americans and Native Americans did not have that right for a long time. When they finally got that, it changed the game, because when you get voting rights, then you have power. And then you can start demanding civil rights, and that led into the protests in the ’60s. And then I think the film representation changed around in the ’70s. The awareness of what was going on with minorities across the board needed to be reflected in entertainment and then film. An early movie that I remember seeing when I was young that really made an impression was Soldier Blue. [Clip from Soldier Blue, 1970] Candice Bergen (as Cresta): Good, brave lads. Coming out here to kill themselves a real live “Injun.” Putting up their forts in a country they’ve got no claim to. So what the hell do you expect the Indians to do? Sit back on their butts while the Army takes over their land? Schulman: Soldier Blue had Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss. And she plays a woman that was adopted by a Cheyenne tribe when she was orphaned and gets involved with Peter Strauss, who’s a soldier, and he comes to see the horrors of what the…
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