The Osage’s current misfortunes began in 1894 with, ironically, the discovery of a gigantic oil reservoir under their Oklahoma land. Suddenly, desperately poor Osage became the richest people on Earth.
But for the US government, that was too much oil and too much money under the control of a people who were not at that time recognised as US citizens. In 1906, the US Congress passed the Burke Act, named after congressman Charles Burke, who called American Indigenous people “half animal”. Burke would head the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which determined that Osage were not sufficiently competent to handle their new wealth. It assigned each full-blood Osage a white “guardian”.
These guardians wrote themselves into Osage wills and insurance policies, then systematically murdered their wards and took their oil rights. That’s where Killers of the Flower Moon ends, in the 1920s.
But the predation continued. The US government barred the tribe from developing their own oil and instead auctioned off the Osage’s drilling rights. The giant reserves were then exploited by the behemoths we now know as Getty Oil, ConocoPhillips, Sinclair and Exxon.
The Osage were left with small “stripper” wells producing too little oil to send out through pipelines. Beginning in the 1960s, a small operator out of Wichita, Kansas, Koch Industries, agreed to send out small tanker trucks to take the Osage crude. Except that Koch truckers would take 30 barrels and write down 20. In 1996, I was brought in as a forensic expert on energy frauds. I calculated they had skimmed off $2.4bn (£2bn) – about $6bn in today’s money.
It’s said that behind every great fortune is a great crime. It was this Osage oil that created one of America’s greatest fortunes: the Koch family, whose wealth is calculated at over $120bn. The Kochs have used this wealth to build a fearsome ultra-rightwing force that can create and destroy political careers. Lisa Graves of True North, an authority on corporate lobbying, calculates that Koch interests have spent no less than $200m on campaigns to attack climate change science.
To the Osage, it’s still raw. Only months ago, Everett Waller, Osage’s resource chair, confronted the Bureau of Indian Affairs at a tense hearing. “When you get a quote from Koch Oil that said they deserve a barrel for every two they had to pay for, you should have hung the bastards.” (Appropriately, in Killers, Waller plays the fierce Osage leader, Paul Red Eagle.)