Talking to students about the real history behind “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a former Osage Nation principal chief said Tuesday he has good reason to believe the movie based on the book will get the story right.
The filmmakers are “making sure the Osage play a significant role in the story, and it gives me hope that we have a new kind of movie that nobody’s ever seen before,” Jim Gray said about the upcoming Martin Scorsese film.
The virtual event, with Gray speaking via Zoom, was sponsored by Tulsa Community College in partnership with the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, with students from both schools participating.
Gray, a former chief and onetime publisher of the Native American Times, is the great-grandson of one of the most well-known victims of the 1920s “Osage Reign of Terror,” the series of murders that form the basis for David Grann’s bestselling book.
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Gray, whose middle name is Roan, was named in honor of his ancestor, Henry Roan, he said.
“The sad part is there’s very little I can tell you about the life of Henry Roan because he was robbed of a childhood, and he was killed as a young man,” Gray said. “He never got to see his granddaughter (Gray’s mother) being born.”
Gray said up to the time of his murder, his ancestor’s story sadly paralleled that of many young tribe members. It began as a child sent away to an Indian boarding school.
“They didn’t go for a semester, they didn’t go for a year,” Gray said. “They went for years, never to return home. And while they were there, they were beaten for speaking their language or practicing their traditional ways.”
“A whole generation of Indian children went through this,” he said. “My great-grandfather came back years later as a grown man, robbed of having any kind of relationship with his family. He fell into this purgatory of being considered neither white nor Osage and like a lot of people it caused him to find ways to self-medicate.”
Gray said for years he didn’t talk about the story of the Osage murders and his own family’s part in it.
“I always kind of kept it to myself,” he said. “I never really thought to tell strangers or anybody about that story because it is painful.”
Many Osages maintained an “uneasy silence,” he said, “because we know what happens to those who speak up. They meet a similar fate to my great-grandfather.”
Gray described a public meeting held in Pawhuska with Scorsese and members of the cast and crew that changed the direction of the film.
Gray was one of the people who spoke, and he appealed to Scorsese to not make another Hollywood “white-savior movie.”
Instead of glamorizing the role of the FBI, “I said ‘tell the story from our perspective. Make sure that our voices are heard. Make the movie that no one in your business has ever made before, be the director of that movie.’”
As a result of the meeting with tribe members, Scorsese decided to delay production and rework the script.
“He said ‘I’m not going to make this movie until I get it right.’”
Gray said the resulting changes were refreshing.
“It really elevates the Osage perspective in the story in a way that the book never intended and the original screenwriter never intended,” he said.
As for Gray, he won’t be silent anymore about his family history, he said.
Of the Osage murders, “a lot of people have said, ‘That was in the past. Why would you want to keep reliving this kind of thing?’ And my answer to that is, ‘If my mom wanted me to forget that past, why would she have named me James Roan Gray?’”
Video: Joe Conner talks about Fairfax and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’
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Killers of the Flower Moon: See all our coverage, from filming in Oklahoma to reaction to the movie
Tim Stanley
Tulsa World Staff Writer
