Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann

⭐ 9.5/10

(Originally written by Tim)

Branching out from my usual genre, I decided to check out this book before the movie comes out later in the year. And I didn’t realize until I picked it up that this is a true story! I have never been into “true crime”, but this is exactly that, and I couldn’t put it down.

This follows a fascinating account of the Osage, a group of Indians (I know I know, this is how they are referred to in the book, so I am going to use that word here) that were forced onto a small reservation in Oklahoma that later had oil discovered on it. This made the Osage incredibly rich, like very very rich. The pictures of traditionally dressed Osage driving fancy cars is pretty cool, and it sounds like a happy story right? Well, a bunch of them start getting murdered. This book follows the investigation from the newly created FBI into these murders.

First off, I can’t believe how long this stuff takes. This isn’t like an episode of CSI, this is crude investigation that takes years to complete. Even the writing of this book, tracking down all these accounts, is astounding to me, a feat of journalism. There are layers and layers to these murders, conspiracies abound, and I was completely caught up in it.

There are some excellent characters, in particular Tom White, the head investigator. There is a flashback chapter on his life growing up with a father who ran a prison, and it is just such a different time and experience. This is truly the wild west, where killing and banditry is rampant. Government hasn’t spanned the whole country yet, so we have lone rangers enforcing the law, something that is easy to glamourize but this story does no such thing.

I am so glad they are making a movie about this, let alone a movie directed by Scorcese with all time movie stars, rather than a cheap Netflix show. The story is really hard to believe. Well, not really, we know all about how we Canadians treated our Indigenous peoples, its just crazy how blatant and disgusting all this murdering was. 100 years feels like forever ago, but not being a historian myself I was also blown away by the technology that we have had for so long, like cars and cameras, even the early use of fingerprinting here. Isn’t it a stereotype that dads all of a sudden have an interest in history? We are here baby!

Hard to get more into what I loved about this with spoiling anything, and normally I would say you can’t spoil something that is in history books, but this is another story no one has ever heard of! There is this section on a land race that was particularly insightful to me, a literal race to claim land that caused lots of fighting and death. The irony of white men racing to claim land, “I was here first” ownership, as a way to auction off land from the Osage who were actually there first, felt like this whole book in a nutshell. Reminded me of Black Wall Street, another disgusting racial massacre (also in Oklahoma) that I had never heard about until I watched the Watchmen show. It also made me think of Reservation Dogs, also set in Oklahoma, but told from the modern perspective of teens on a reservation. That show is amazing, and I have written about it at length here, so I won’t make comparisons, its just very interesting to think about the 100 year gap between the stories of these people.

The movie will most likely be a hit, and that’s because the source material, in particular Grann’s extensive investegative work, is phenominal. It also taps into the dark side of the American story, all the lives that were lost in the pursuit of liquid gold. I love There Will Be Blood for its battle between God and Oil/Money, where both are used to manipulate and further selfish interest. This book never really mentions the Christian God, but the Osage are spiritual people who are also becoming Catholic as they become Americanized. I think this is just a theme I have recently locked on to, man bleeding the earth dry to progress as a society, but one more evolutionary step leading to more ways and reasons to kill others. Oppenheimer has some of this too, and it all goes back to Prometheus, advancing humankind but opening the door for new horrors. Something about man tapping into nature, or divine intervention helping us take that next step like in 2001, leading to our downfalls is just so fascinating to me, maybe because it draws a direct line between greedy oil tycoons of the past and self-absorbed internet shills of the present. Oil being this perfect allegory for blood, all the religious stuff that comes with that, and the gold then oil rush being the foundation for this side of the world, and then even today’s technology and its relationship to oil, the wars that have been fought over it, just a recent fascination I find super poetic.

That’s enough of that, read the book or watch the movie, it doesn’t matter. This is a story I am glad I have heard, and am glad will be getting a bunch of attention in the near future.