A century ago, the richest people per capita in the world didn’t live in New York or London or Paris. On the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, a nation of Native Americans discovered that the seemingly barren land they had been forced onto was in fact rich with oil.
Tragedy followed the newfound prosperity. Over more than a decade, white plotters married and murdered the Osage to inherit the rights to the oil, in what became known as the Reign of Terror. It is suspected that hundreds of Osage were murdered.
This is the story that legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, at 80 years old, has told in his new film, a three-hour, 26-minute epic based on David Grann’s book of the same name: Killers of the Flower Moon.
And it is this story, with its impacts still felt now, that has led current Osage chief Geoffrey Standing Bear to London for the first time, encountering his first cup of “British tea”.
“It is a way to show the world this is a true story, and you can take away from it what you want. I would think people need to understand that it’s showing that if this can happen to us, it can happen to anyone. That’s the story,” Standing Bear tells The Big Issue.
With the film set to be released on 20 October, Standing Bear explains that the once-wealthy Osage people still face struggles with housing, healthcare and their rights.
“This situation continues but on a much lower level of intensity,” he says.
Spanning from 1918 to 1931, the Reign of Terror is an under-acknowledged but not unknown story, brought back to, the work of non-fiction runs along like a mystery.
