‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Murders Never Stopped for Native Americans

This article was produced through a new partnership between Newsweek and the Osage News, the official independent media of the Osage Nation. The cooperative reporting process aims to shine a light on the cases of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People throughout the United States and the multiple failures to end the decades-long deadly crisis that spans the continent.

While Killers of the Flower Moon is among Oscars favorites, with Lily Gladstone tipped to become the first Native American woman to be named Best Actress, the stakes at the awards are much higher for the Osage Nation portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s heartbreaking film and for Indigenous people across America.

In telling the true story of the way white settlers strategically married members of the Osage and then killed them to gain control of their rights to rich oil fields in Oklahoma, the century-old tale is drawing timely attention to a modern crisis of murders and disappearances among Native people.

Murder is the third leading cause of death for Indigenous women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. While thousands of Indigenous Women disappear each year, the bodies of those who are murdered are less likely to be identified and their cases are less likely to be investigated by law enforcement than those involving other ethnicities.

Now, Indigenous people across the country, including many members of the Osage Nation, hope the film could spur action.

Although state and federal taskforces have been set up to tackle the crisis, they often appear to lack the funding or motivation to address it. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, part of the Department of the Interior that is intended to serve the interests of Indigenous people, did not respond to requests for comment on the crisis or the efforts of law enforcement agencies to address it.

“Killers of the Flower Moon … helps you put all of these women’s faces on Lily Gladstone,” said Angela Pratt, an Army veteran and former Osage Nation Congress member.

Pratt is also a descendant of one of the Osage people portrayed in the movie, which has generated much anticipation of winning awards, not least for Gladstone’s powerful portrayal of Mollie Burkhart, who saw many of her family members murdered by settlers seeking their assets.

“On the prevention level, we need to address the abuse, and the generational trauma that our people come from,” Pratt said, adding that it is important to raise the self-esteem of young people to address the issues that still manifest in murder, abuse and manipulation. “We’re talking generations,” she said. “So, it’s taking generations to try to climb out of it.”

The saddest part, Pratt said, is that ongoing racism makes it so hard.

“To [many], we are still the soulless scum of the earth, in this country, considering we are the original people,” she said.

Numbers

The data on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is stark. Most glaring is a failure to track how often Indigenous people go missing.

The actual number of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) is effectively unknowable. The varying numbers held by different federal authorities likely represent major undercounts, given that none of them contain comprehensive nationwide data, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office.

For example, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center showed that 5,491 Indigenous women were missing at the end of 2023, yet the Department of Justice’s NamUs – a project to document missing persons cases – only listed 261 missing Indigenous women during the same period.

Federal law requires federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to report missing people under age 21, but not those who are older. And tribal authorities do not have one pathway to report missing people at all.

Despite Indigenous women making up 1 percent of the missing people documented in the DOJ database, the bodies of Native American women are 135 percent more likely to go unidentified than the remains of women of other ethnicities in the U.S., according to a paper published in the Criminal Justice Policy Review journal in March 2023.

That disparity signals a major failure in the data and reporting, said Nikolay Anguelov, one of the of the paper’s authors.

Additionally, many of those Indigenous women are incorrectly labeled as the wrong ethnicity, he added. That’s largely due to a widespread misconception that Indigenous women primarily live on tribal land.

U.S. Census data from 2020 shows that just 13 percent of the 9.7 million people who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native actually live on tribal land. Anguelov said that Indigenous women are particularly likely to leave tribal land for urban areas.

“From what we’re seeing in this data, the vulnerability for Native women is heightened away from home and at a much higher rate than for women of other races, in terms of being classified as unidentified remains,” said Anguelov, a political economist and associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He and his coauthors examined 7,454 cases of missing women or unidentified remains for their research.

“Being reported missing is one thing, but nobody is reporting the missing,” Anguelov said.

The authorities of the time were complicit in the Osage murders of the Killers of the Flower Moon and local government now perpetuates the epidemic through inaction and negligence, said Osage leader, Talee Redcorn.

He portrayed the traditional leader Non-Hon-Zhin-Ga in Scorsese’s film and resides in Pawhuska Indian Camp Village, where he is the chairman of the village’s five-man board.

“The local community and the sheriffs and the judges and the coroners and all of them were involved, and it took the federal government to step in with the FBI to come and save the day, or at least, try to right some wrongs that are going on,” he said. “And strangely enough … it still happens, and I believe Natives are minimized in our communities.”

Redcorn said the film addresses the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people, by showing how the local dominant culture can contribute to violence, injustice and murder — issues that still resonate today.

Distrust

Indigenous people are not reporting their loved ones missing for various reasons, including distrust, said Olivia Gray, a member of the Osage Nation and president of the board of NOISE, a nonprofit also known as Northeastern Oklahoma Indigenous Safety & Education. The group advocates for victims and families in MMIP cases.

Many see telling authorities as pointless after generations of inaction when reports had been made, Gray said.

Law enforcement “needs to learn how to read laws. And then follow them. That would be helpful,” Gray said. “In Oklahoma, there is no waiting period to file a missing persons report. But, just this past week, I had someone reach out and say, ‘They will not let me file a report until 24 hours have elapsed.'”

Police always worry about confusions over jurisdiction, but Native people know exactly where the lines are, Gray said.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are declining to take on the cases involving Native people or occurring on tribal land, she said.

“I’m just wondering why a district attorney who gets paid a lot more than I do, or governor, or even the policeman down the street. Why don’t they know this? They just don’t know what to do and so therefore, nothing gets done,” Gray said.

Laws tie the hands of tribal authorities over major crimes. The 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act was intended to expand their powers, but they remain very limited. The longest sentence a tribal court can give—even for murder—is three years. And the maximum total sentence when someone is convicted of multiple crimes is three maximum three-year sentences, or nine years.

The Major Crimes Act of 1885 still prohibits tribal courts from charging or prosecuting any non-tribal people. That changed slightly in 2011 with the Violence Against Women Act, which allows tribal courts to charge and prosecute non-Native people for domestic violence, dating violence and protective order violations. The most recent reauthorization added stalking, sexual assault and crimes against children or police officers.

Between the confusion over which agency should investigate, the limitations on tribes, and district attorneys failing to prosecute, there’s no one in power to turn to for help, Gray said.

“How do we hold a DA accountable who won’t file charges?” she added. “Will you wait till the next election? Okay, so how many women are going to get beaten or killed until the next election?”

The lack of tribal authority has put a target on the back of Native American women everywhere, said Kerri Colfer, director of policy for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

“Families often have witnesses or evidence that they try to bring in to law enforcement about a family member’s MMIW case and they don’t know who to contact or no one is contacting them back,” she said. “They don’t know if the case is still being investigated. There’s zero communication there.”

That makes it even less likely that future cases will be reported, she said.

“Perpetrators tend to know that, so they believe they can harm Native women with impunity, and that they’re very unlikely to suffer any consequences for their actions,” Colfer added.

Settlers

The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women dates back to the first entrance of white settlers into this continent, said Everett Waller, also a leader among the Wahzhazhe — what the Osage call themselves, the chairman of the Osage Minerals Council, and a direct descendant of the traditional Osage leader Wah-Tian-Kah, who guided the people’s decision to purchase their reservation. Waller is the actor who portrayed Paul Red Eagle in Killers of the Flower Moon.

“There is no worse enemy than the one that takes your women’s hearts,” he said. “One hundred years ago, [murder] was encouraged. Two hundred years ago, it was a massacre. Today, it’s still going on. I am a man that has had three murdered cousins. … [Our] pride is what they’re taking away from us. This murder, I’ve seen how it affects a family and destroys it. Well, there’s hundreds of those. Just remember it’s a real story, it’s a real family, and there’s a lot of others.”

Distrust for what are seen as settler-led justice systems is illustrated through the ongoing case of L.B. v. The United States, in which a Native American woman living on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana was sexually assaulted in 2015 by an on-duty officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The officer was jailed, but the woman’s quest for federal compensation through the courts has been a tortuous one — and exposed what the Osage and other Native people often feel is mistreatment from government authorities and law enforcement.

Margo Gray is an Osage who plays Grace Bigheart in the film, and she spent 18 years in law enforcement because she never wanted what had happened to her real Osage family to happen to anyone else’s. Today, she directs the United Indian Nations of Oklahoma.

She highlighted what she said were decades of failures by federal, state and local leaders.

“They don’t understand what missing and murdered Indigenous women are, and that this has skyrocketed,” she said. “There’s not a week that goes by that we’re not having to put out a flyer that someone’s daughter, someone’s grandson is missing, and it hits closer and closer to home every week.”

Solutions

Osage institutions have come up with proposals to address the crisis based on the idea that the best way to address it is from within the community, but they have yet to win state or federal funding or other money based on sovereign resources.

The Osage Nation Counseling Center (ONCC) wants a tribal database for offenses occurring on trust land throughout Indian Country to be able to respond more decisively to the cases of the missing and the murdered, according to CEO of the Wahzhazhe Health System, Mark Rogers.

Additionally, the ONCC has called for the establishment of a Family Justice Center to help prevent MMIP cases from stalling out or getting lost in the system. When complex situations involve multiple factors such as domestic violence, law enforcement, Indian Child Welfare Act considerations, legal counsel, and more, it can overwhelm those who are seeking help.

Rogers believes the tribal database and Family Justice Center would help, but he would also need more court advocates and tribal law enforcement, as well as a tribal IT-managed security system for real-time emergency investigations. Also helpful would be an electronic health record system for coordination of services for clients and victims of family violence, domestic abuse, and exploitation.

Rogers highlighted one specific success over an MMIP case, in which a victim of sex trafficking had been helped to recovery and reunification with their family by the Osage Nation Counseling Center and has found a good job managing a retail store. He hoped there would be more such successes.

“This case involved multi-agency, multi-county coordination and a process that took over a year for each. It ultimately led to prison time of the perpetrator,” he said.

Whether led by tribes or governments, Native Americans said advocates were essential to ending the crisis of the missing and murdered.

Osage leader Redcorn said that Mollie Burkhart had been one of the biggest voices to make a difference when she spoke out a century ago.

Gladstone has stepped into the role of a modern-day advocate, using the platform she has gained from her role in Killers of the Flower Moon and highlighting the work of Indigenous women to address the crisis over the murdered and missing.

“The only people who have any authority to do anything do nothing, and the people who are left to do anything about it are these women here, women who have children in our communities,” Gladstone said in a speech last year. “A nation is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground,” she said, quoting a Northern Cheyenne saying. “So it’s our work to uplift each other.”