Zack Sharf Digital News Director Martin Scorsese’s $200 million epic “Killers of the Flower Moon,” based on David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book, centers on the Reign of Terror, a term the Osage Nation used to define the murders of at least 60 community members in the late 1920s.
The film tells this true crime tale through the lens of a marriage between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a World War I veteran who relocates to Oklahoma to work with his rancher uncle, and Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), a local Osage woman whose family was one of the community’s wealthiest.
Robert De Niro stars as Ernest’s uncle, William Hale. As both Grann’s book and Scorsese’s film lay out, the cause for the murders trace back to the early 1870s when the U.S.
government forced the Osage people to leave their Kansas lands and move to northeastern Oklahoma. The Osage bought their Oklahoma reservation, a game-changing decision that gave them the rights over their new land.
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