By Jim Gray and David Grann
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
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.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
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.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
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.
