Killers of the Flower Moon. Did I really want to watch it? Knowing the topic, I have been avoiding it—such a contrary depiction of the Wild West Hopalong Cassidy movies I went to at the Dresden Theater here in Sequim, where the cowboys were as honest as the day is long and the Indians were bloodthirsty “savages.”
In Killers of the Flower Moon, it is the Osage tribal members who are honest—and the white men, starting with Robert DeNiro, portraying William “King” Hale, are the bloodthirsty savages. Yes, Hale, a cattle rancher on Osage land and a deputy sheriff, is a ruthless killer even if he poses as a friend and benefactor of the Osage people.
Based on David Grann’s non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, the movie dramatizes the Osage tribe’s sudden transformation from subsistence dwellers of the arid, windblown prairie in Oklahoma to the richest people in the world. Oil has been discovered on their reservation. The law decrees that the Osage people own the land and all the mineral wealth beneath it. It cannot be given away, sold, or leased, only inherited. So to get their greedy hands on this Osage wealth, “King” Hale conceives a plot: White men will marry Osage women—and in the years that follow, far too many of these women die, leaving their white husbands owners of the land. Sure enough, these white owners are creeping steadily ahead in the drive to strip the Osage of their oil wealth.
I watched the film, first released by Paramount in 2023, from beginning to end, and it left me depressed. World War I vet Ernest, nephew of “King” Hale, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, follows the advice of his uncle and marries the full-blooded Osage woman, Mollie Kyle. He seems to love her and their children. Yet she is diabetic, and she decides that only he can give her the insulin shots she needs to stay alive. So Ernest is giving her the shots when his uncle intercedes, ordering his nephew to add another capsule of an unknown ingredient to each injection. This jackasss does not even ask what the ingredient is, but he goes ahead and gives her the daily shots, the ingredient added.
She gets weaker and weaker. Yet Mollie has enough energy to join a delegation to Washington, D.C., where she is introduced to President Calvin Coolidge. She tells him that far too many Osage women are dying prematurely. A few weeks later, the newly established FBI shows up to investigate. The film shows the FBI agents hunting down and bringing to trial the criminals engaged in this murderous thievery.
The film ends with a depiction of a popular radio program dramatizing the FBI tracking down, arresting, trying, and convicting these scoundrels. A narrator tells us it is all because of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover!
I turned off the TV and headed for bed. But first, I think I will Google a little. The first article I found was a review of Killers of the Flower Moon by Chauncey K. Robinson on the People’s World online website, hailing the movie, especially the performance of Lily Gladstone, a Piegan-Blackfeet tribal member, in the role of Molly Kyle, a quiet Osage woman. I agreed with Chauncey’s opinion that Lily Gladstone gives an Oscar-winning performance in the film.
A name kept churning around in my brain: “Koch.” J. Edgar Hoover and his descendants never seemed to bring Charles and David Koch to justice, even though Koch had an infamous history of stealing oil from the Osage Tribe.
I Googled. Up popped a website: “(F)law.” It is dedicated to exposing and popularizing especially flagrant instances of powerful forces—especially giant corporations and banks—trampling on the legal rights of poor and low-income people. (F)law features an article by Anne DeLong headlined, “Big Oil Evades Accountability for Corporate Greed in Indian Country.” DeLong is identified as a full-blooded Osage woman who recently graduated from Harvard Law School. Her article focuses on Koch Oil, Koch Industries, and the Koch brothers, Charles and David.
She writes about the film Killers of the Flower Moon. These “stories of theft and deception endured by my people,” she writes, did not end. “Disturbingly, these stories go well beyond the 1920s murders depicted in the film. They are ongoing.”
She adds, “In 1987, investigators began to suspect that big oil companies were stealing oil from Native oil wells. Senate hearings validated these concerns.
“One company in particular emerged as a standout culprit: Koch Oil….a subsidiary of Koch Industries and the largest purchaser of Indian oil in the country, is the most dramatic example of an oil company stealing by deliberate mismeasurement and fraudulent reporting….”
Adds DeLong, “That Koch brothers could orchestrate such dastardly plots isn’t shocking today. But that they schemed so close to home was unknown to me at the time. Their names are synonymous with infamous deeds. The Koch brothers, the shadowy architects of the Tea Party movement, the kingpins of climate science denial, the Koch brothers through their organization Americans for Prosperity, achieved corporate tax cuts and killed Medicaid expansion across the country. But years earlier, they cut their teeth by stealing from the Osage people’s subsistence, from a lifeline for so many in my family.”
DeLong does not mention the role of Koch in pouring unlimited corporate cash into the campaigns of right-wing, pro-corporate politicians like President Donald Trump. The Koch brothers were instrumental in ramming through the U.S. Supreme Court the infamous U.S. v. Citizens United, which grants corporations the right to donate unlimited funds — secretly — to their chosen political candidates. The High Court upheld the Koch absurdity that corporations are people entitled to “freedom of speech.” This ruling has brought bribery, corporate corruption, and rot into the U.S. political system.
Nancy S. Jones, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Oklahoma, took up the investigation of Koch Oil in the 1980s. “She believed that the crime went ‘all the way to the Executive suite,’” DeLong writes.
“Her findings sketched out the nature of the theft: High-level managers instructed the field employees to engage in the ‘Koch method,’ a ‘method for stealing oil in which gaugers intentionally misreported the amount and quality of oil they collected at well sites.”
As the investigation intensified, “Koch devised a plan,” she continues. “Koch’s first tactical goal was to change the political landscape around the issue of oil theft. The plan’s lead manipulator, Ron Howell, knew to get the Tribe on their side. In 1990, he facilitated a meeting between the Koch brothers and Osage Nation leaders.”
Their message was simple: “When it comes to measuring crude oil extraction, there is always uncertainty….and at the end of the day, Osage headright holders always received their checks in the mail.”
The upshot of that meeting is that Chief Charles O. Tillman released a public statement supporting Kochs’ “innocence.” It seemed that all attempts to hold Koch Oil accountable for the theft, to defend the basic rights of the Osage people, collapsed.
But one opening remained. Bill and Frederick Koch, brothers of Koch heirs David and Charles Koch, filed a lawsuit under the False Claims Act accusing their brothers of filing thousands of false documents on the amount of oil pumped from Osage tribal wells.
The proof was so damning that Koch Industries agreed to a secret settlement. But the Osage people won nothing from this settlement. Another secret settlement was with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which managed the Osage agreement with Koch Oil once the Tribe signed over the oil drilling rights.
Anne DeLong—herself expecting to become an oil well headright owner in the future—asked Osage tribal member Wilson Pipestem, currently a headright well owner, his opinion of the current settlement with Koch Oil. Pipestem told her he believes Koch Oil is stealing at least $10 million worth of oil each year through deliberate under-measurement of oil pumped from Osage wells. The Osage “are nowhere near being made whole,” he said.
In recent years, another crisis has emerged. Many of the wells are running dry. Yet Koch Oil simply walks away, leaving the wells uncapped, leaking oil and fumes into the soil and atmosphere. The struggle for justice for the Osage people continues without letup. DeLong writes. Don’t count on the FBI to end this Koch theft.
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