October 27, 2023 • 39 mins
Henry Roan has been shot through the back of his head. The local authorities have found his body slumped over the steering wheel of his car. There's no gun at the scene: this is no suicide - it's brutal murder. And the man who ordered Henry Roan's killing? He claims to be his best friend...
Former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation Jim Roan Gray joins Tim Harford to speak about his great-grandfather Henry Roan. They also discuss the Osage Nation today and Jim's take on the new film Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese.
This episode of Cautionary Tales was produced in association with Apple Original Films. Killers of the Flower Moon stars William Belleau as Henry Roan, Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone.
Do you have a question for Tim? Please email any queries you might have, however big or small, to tales@pushkin.fm.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This episode of Cautionary Tales is produced in association
with Apple Original Films. Their new movie, Killers of the
Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, is now in theaters
Osage County, Oklahoma. February nineteen twenty three. It's cold, very cold.
(00:43):
The Deputy Sheriff and town Marshal of Fairfax are on
the lookout for an abandoned car. When they see it
the bottom of a rocky valley, they walk down to investigate.
The driver is slumped over the steering wheel. Drunk, thinks
the deputy, and he says as much. But he's not drunk.
(01:04):
He's dead. The man's name is Henry Rohane. The school
he was forced to go to, made him cut his hair,
made him wear a suit, tried to beat his O
Sage identity out of him. It was a terrible experience,
but Henry roan had become rich thanks to his share
of the lucrative head rights that directed oil revenue to
(01:25):
the small number of people recognized as members of the
O Sage Nation. Now he's been shot through the back
of the head. There's no gun at the scene. This
is no suicide. It's murder, and the man who ordered
Henry Roan to be killed. Is the man who claimed
(01:46):
to be his best friend, a man who would be
a pall bearer at Roan's funeral. This is a follow
up to our previous episode about the reign of terror
which afflicted the O Sage people in nineteen twenty's Oklahoma.
Members of the Osage were picked off to gain control
(02:06):
of the oil which lay under their land. Others, such
as Henry Rohan, were targeted as part of other equally
dreadful schemes. My telling of the story owed a great
deal to David Grand's book Killers of the Flower Moon
and focused on what happened to a single family. If
you haven't listened to that yet, I suggest you do.
(02:29):
But this is more than the story of Molly Burkhardt
and her murdered sisters and mother, Anna, Rita, Minnie and Lizzie.
Countless O Sage people lost their lives, and many of
the murders have never been solved. Even more, O Sage
were swindled out of their land and exploited by a
racist structure that treated them as incompetence. The impact on
(02:52):
the community has left a mark for generations. I'm Tim
Harford and you're listening to a special episode of Cautionary Tales.
(03:24):
Killers of the Flower Moon has been adapted into a
film by director Martin Scorsese and is out in theaters now.
Scorsese's longtime collaborator, Robert Naniro plays William K. Hale, the
man who orchestrated the murders of Molly Burkhardt's sisters and mother.
But Hale was also found guilty of murdering Henry Roan,
(03:44):
and it was Roan's death that led FBI agent Tom
White to key clues that helped him crack the case.
Henry Rohan's great grandson is Jim Roan Gray. Jim is
a former principal chief of the o s Age Nation,
and I'm delighted to say he joins me now. Jim
Roan Gray, Welcome to caution Me Tales.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Well, we're so glad that you could join us. And Jim,
I know you were born in Ocege County, but then
you moved to Denver, Colorado as a child and stayed
there until you were a teenager. So how much had
you been told about the Osage reign of terror when
you were growing up.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
To be honest, I think that many osay, just not
just my mom, just didn't talk about those things that
happened in the twenties. My mom, Henry Room's granddaughter, was
born a couple of years after he was murdered, so
the fact that she named me after him did give
her reason to say his name won't be forgotten in
(04:43):
the family and his story will hopefully continue to be told.
But after we moved back to Oklahoma, there was a
broadcast of the FBI story which was on.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Television and this is a movie.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, it was a movie. It was a bit of
a propaganda to raise the profile of the FBI, and
it was based in nineteen fifty nine, two years before
I was born. And it was a show is starring
Jimmy Stewart playing the FBI investigator who went down to
Osage Country to crack the case of the Osage murders.
(05:17):
But in their version, it was a fictional tribe, no
connection to the Osage at all. But they kept Henry
Run's name. Why they used Henry Run's name and left
it in there and kept all the Osage elements out.
I have no idea you're.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Watching this movie, which is a puff piece for the FBI,
that is about the suffering of a tribe, even though
they've changed the name, and is about this FBI investigation.
So you know, what did you learn from that? What
did it feel like watching it?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Well, of course I recognized the name, but I was
a high school kid at the time. I was just
a kid, you know, I knew who I was named after.
So that gave an inkling of my exposure to this
story in our family. The sad party is is that,
you know, I just felt like I was not quite
as connected to it because the FBI from their point
(06:10):
of view, It wasn't from my point of view or
my mom's or my tribes. It was the FBI. They
solved all the crimes in o Sage Country and they left,
so not much to take from that if you're in
the Osage you know what I'm saying. Now. As I
grew to be a young man, I started doing my
own research and started reading books that had already been
published at that time in the nineteen eighties and nineties
(06:32):
and two thousands that helped fill in the gaps, so
to speak.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
It has extraordinary that you were having to teach yourself
about the history of what had happened.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Many Osage families just did not want to talk about it,
I think for many reasons, some of which were based
on those that survived that period of time. The FBI
came and they investigated these murders, and they brought justice
to a couple of individuals who had committed these crimes,
and then they left. What continued to happen in O
(07:05):
Sage country is that people continued to die. Their life
and wealth and land were all taken in various ways.
The Osages came into an enormous amount of money in
a very short period of time, and it was concentrated
within a couple of thousand people. The Osa just suddenly
fell into a higher income status that developed a fair
(07:30):
amount of resentment among the rest of the population around us.
Newspaper journalists of the day would write about the extravagant
spending habits of certain O Sages, implying that all Osages
were doing that and generating an enormous amount of interest
in this, both good and bad, and all kinds of
(07:51):
elements descended into the Osage community, bent on getting a
cut of the action in whatever means they felt they
could get away with. Some were store owners that issued
credit to O Sages and overcharged exorbitant prices for basic
everyday items like say, a hammer would cost one hundred
(08:11):
dollars in nineteen twenty dollars, which would have put it
somewhere over one thousand dollars today, and the BIA would
just pay these bills and suddenly put these O Sages
into debt, and these store owners would say, hey, this
guy owes me money you can't pay, and they settle
the debt by giving their sage land to these individuals,
(08:33):
and they became credibly wealthy by doing that. Definitely, a
fair amount of white collar crime was occurring under those
federal policies of the day that allowed people the luxury
of being able to direct the spending of O Sage
money as well as who eventually inherited the Osage money,
and there was a practice of marrying into the tribe
(08:56):
that gave people enormous influence over that. But also the
guardian systems that were imposed on O Sages who were
half led O Sage or more every aspect of their
life in terms of what they could spend money on,
where they lived, where they shopped, who they hung out
with everything was under the control of this guardian. This
(09:18):
interest to the Osay just coming into that wealth created
an incentive to kill osages for their money.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I want to ask about your great grandfather, Henry Rohman.
He was born, I think a little bit before the
oil was discovered. Taught me through what you've learned about
him and the situation he faced as he was growing up.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
One of the things that happened during that period of
time after the so called Indian Wars of that era,
Little Big Warned Wounded Knee and Chief Joseph and the
Nez person Geronimo, and all these stories that came from
Indian resistance. We saw a very hostile set of federal
(10:01):
policies towards tribes and individual Indians, of punishment of some
kind for just be an Indian. Lot of federal policies
were bent on not only breaking up the collective landholdings
of all the tribes through a process called allotment, but
also the breakup of their tribal governments. So they were
(10:22):
powerless really to defend themselves, to protect themselves, to advance
their interest. And then adding to it one last piece,
which was assimilation. And this is where they actually took
children out of their homes, oftentimes against the will of
their parents, and send them off to these re education
camps called Indian boarding schools. They were there for years
(10:46):
without much communication back to their families, and their clothes
were burned, they were replaced with military uniforms, their hair
was shaved, and they were paraded around in these photographs
of kind of before and after pictures that these schools
used to perpetuate the success of the program. What was
(11:10):
behind those photographs was a series of beatings for Indian
children who spoke their language. They were forced into servitude
to local families that lived in the area to do
menial labor. They were abused, some were molested, some were raped,
some committed suicide. Some tried to run away and were
(11:31):
beaten severely. This was also something that the o Sage
families went through as well.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
And that's what happened to your great grandfather, Henry Rown.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
My great grandfather, was one such story. He spent his
early years of his life in a boarding school in Pennsylvania,
which is about one thousand miles away. He spent I
think seven years there, basically robbed of a traditional Osage upbringing,
and not really having much of a human connection. And
(12:01):
I don't know whether or not he was beaten or
molested or any of that. I do know that through
some historical docum imments it was pretty clear he just
wanted to be left alone when he got back.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, I'm looking at a photograph of him now as
a schoolboy with short hair, and he's wearing a suit
and he's wearing a tie. I'm sure you've seen the
same photograph. And what it says to you when you
see that image.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Well, they tried to remove the osage that was a
part of him and turn him into something else, often
against his will. So I think that the image that
tells me is that he probably didn't have the agency
(12:48):
to be able to make his own choices about whether
or not he wanted to be there. Yeah, you know,
he married and had a family, but I feel like
he struggled with his identity. And I think that's one
of the outcomes of the boarding school experience is that
not just Henry Rohan, but Indian children throughout the United
States who went this experience came back I guess you
(13:12):
could say damaged and not really fitting into the traditional
Indian world. That they came from, but certainly not fitting
into the white world because to them they were just
another Indian. Henry's just one of many stories from that
period of time, and others were treated worse and some
never survived that experience. So the fact that he came back,
(13:36):
you know, albeit maybe confused or a worse damaged because
of it. Psychologically, it struggled to reclaim his O sage identities.
You can tell as he's a young man. There's a
picture of him where he's grown his hair out. You know,
he's refusing to allow that boarding school experience to fine him.
(13:59):
And I take some measure of comfort and knowing that
that policy failed to achieve its goals, but it did
lead to other unfortunate events that happened to him later
in life. Henry row never got the therapy that he deserved, yeah,
(14:19):
to recover from that experience.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
I'm speaking to Jim Roan Gray and after the break,
I'll be talking to Jim about how his great grandfather,
Henry Rohan got to know the murderous mastermind William K. Hale.
Cautionary tales will be back in just a moment. Jim,
(14:47):
you've described your great grandfather being taken away to this
boarding school where he was subject to this process of
trying to force him to assimilate. It's a thousand miles
away from his family, and then he comes back and
he's and you use the word damaged. You also told
us that you have all of these characters circle Osage
(15:10):
Country trying to one way or another get in on
the oil money. That brings us to William Hale and
his relationship with Henry Rohan.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I could see the value that Hale got out of
being friends with Henry Ron. I''m not sure what value
Henry got out of being friends with William Hale other
than the fact that this was a white, very popular,
charismatic person in the community that had a lot of friends.
You know, not just Henry Rowan, but many Osage just
(15:41):
considered him a friend. During those days before the Reign of.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Terror, William Hale was a poll bearer at your great
grandfather's funeral and claimed to be a close friend. And
yet all the time he had been moving behind the
scenes to take advantage of Henry. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
He claims he loaned money to Henry Ron and that
was the justification for him taking the life insurance policy
out on him. The attitude of white people towards Indians.
It wasn't subtle, We'll just say that. And for him
to make the claim, William hal had to shop his
(16:20):
life insurance policy around to several different insurance providers. And
the reason is that it looked like a setup and
he was being set up. William Hale played on Henry's
emotions by saying that his wife was cheating on him
with a local white man in town. He claims he
(16:40):
was doing his friend of favor by letting him know.
I just know that the entire characterization of Henry Roan
has been bred into this story by the person who
ordered his killing, and I'm inclined to not take his
word for any of this. Maybe Henry Roan heard something
(17:02):
that he shouldn't have. And there's also rumors that there
was a traditional wedding between Molly Burkhardt and Henry Rown
years before she ever met Ernest.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
So let me get this straight. Your great grandfather might
have been married to Molly before she married William Hale's
nephew Ernest Burkhardt, and could potentially make a claim to
the Headwright that William Hale was plotting to secure for himself.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
They did organize marriages back in those days. It wasn't uncommon,
but given the times and what Henry had gone through
at Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania, the marriage didn't succeed
and they went their different ways. A traditional marriage could
be something that Henry Rohan could make a claim for.
I don't know. I mean, there's lots of theories about
(17:52):
that relationship, some of which we'll never know. One's only
left to speculate.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah, you've alluded that to Henry struggling to settle into
married life, and like many people who survived the boarding
school system, he wasn't known to drink, and William Hale
played on that, didn't he.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
My view is that to take William Hale's account of
the worth and value of Henry Rohan's life would be
stupid because he's using it to defend himself. I mean,
the fact that this case went through so many different
courts and had to be retried multiple times before they
ever got around it getting him convicted speaks a lot
(18:31):
to mainstream society's perception of the value of Indian people's lives.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah, Hale had arranged somehow to be the beneficiary of
Henry Rohan's life insurance policy, and then Hale had his
cronious murder Henry Rohan. So what I'm hearing from you
is everything else that was said about Henry Rohan's drinking
and maybe there was an affair, and maybe this and
maybe that. Yeah, well maybe, but we can't rely on
(19:00):
any of that because that's all the snake screen for
the bald fact of the case.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Exactly right.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
But those facts did, in the end put Tom White
of the Buereau of Investigations onto the case. That seemed
to be a very important step in the unlocking of
the murders that were solved. I hear what you said
that not all the murders were sold by any means,
but it was important in putting Hale behind bars in
the end.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Well, you got to understand too, that it wasn't until
nineteen twenty four, a year after Henrion was murdered, that
the United States recognized the indigenous communities in this country
as US citizens. And so it wasn't just bad people,
it was bad federal policy with assimilation, allotment, the breakup
(19:46):
of tribal governments, and the fact that we were one
of the last people in this country to get recognized
as being US citizens. We were inferior, We were subhuman.
We weren't entitled to anything other than suffering and being
at the beck and call of people who believed in
(20:07):
the manifest destiny of God gave us this right to
colonize this entire continent, even if it came at the
expense of millions of indigenous people who got in the
way of that. There was still that mentality that existed
and not a pretty chapter in American history. But this
(20:28):
movie is bringing a lot of these elements into light now.
I want to make sure that your listeners understand that
our resilience and our stubbornness got us through that, and
our willingness to adopt certain aspects of the dominant culture
and accept them as part of a way of life,
(20:52):
but not giving in entirely to all the things that
made us o sage is what helped us survive that
period of time. And as we modernized our tribal government
years later, when I was chief, we were able to
prioritize the resources of our tribe to invest in the
(21:14):
health and education and the cultural and language preservation initiatives
that resulted in our ability to collaborate with Scorsese in
such a way that showcased the oce age culture as
an elemental part, almost literally a character in this film
that retained the dignity of our people and respect for
(21:37):
the ancestors who were tragically murdered during that period of time.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, I mean, you must have heard about the book
Killers of the Flower Moon, the bestseller, and then you
hear Martin Scorsese wants to make it into a film.
How did that feel when you heard that was happening.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
It was kind of a one two punch. Actually, the
movie rights were sold before the book even became public.
The reader's interest in this story was overwhelming, and it
became the number one bookseller on Amazon that year, and
it was heralded as a very important piece of literature
and a true crime story that was largely forgotten in
(22:15):
the pages of history. And so David Grant had brought
all of this to light. And then word got out
that Martin Scorsese had read the book and expressed an
interest in making this into a film, and the people
had legitimate concerns. Hollywood as an industry doesn't have a
(22:36):
very good track record of telling indigenous stories accurately. Many
of us worried that in Scorsese's hand, the violence might
overtake the story, and we wanted to express our concerns
about o sages who were descendants of the people who
were murdered, like myself, got together and wrote to Scorsese
(23:00):
and said, we would like to meet with you and
talk about what your intentions are with this film, how
our answertors are going to be treated in the story.
This is a painful story for our people. We would
like to invite you to break bread with us, eat
here with us, and meet with us in our community.
And just Coorsese's credit, he did come, and he brought
(23:23):
his whole team with him, just not just himself, but
all the people that has worked on his films going
back decades.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
What did he say to him.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Well, that was obviously starstruck, just like everyone else. I mean,
he's only eight feet away from me, and I'm talking
to a group of one hundred and fifty oh sages
in the room, and each one of us were a
little uncomfortable, you know, but we got over it. I
talked to him from a standpoint of just there are
(23:54):
elements of this story that are in this book that
are historically accurate, but the O Sage culture as how
we saw the world and how we interact with one another,
and how we deal with crisis, and how we cling
to our culture using the resources that we had at
(24:14):
the time as a way to achieve the resilience that
was needed to get through that period of time. That
wasn't contained in the book, but it is found in
this room, in the lives and the stories of the
descendants of those that were victims of that period of
time of those crimes. I told him, you have an
opportunity to do something that Hollywood hasn't done before, or
(24:36):
your industry hasn't done before. Other famous movies of the past,
like Dances with Wolve's Little Big Man and Last the
Mohicans were all written by non Indians and a fictionalized
story about what happened to those tribes, and it had
this white savior element to it, you know, And none
of those things are present in this story. And nobody
(24:59):
in this room wants you to fail to the extent
that you'll let us. We want to help you in
every way we can. And I ended the statement with
be the director to make that film, be the director
to make that film that your industry will point to
in the future and say that's the one we got. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Do you think he succeeded?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
From my experience, he honored his word when he said
he would work the script and he would consult with
the tribe, and he did, in fact consult with the
tribe and integrated enormous amounts of Osage art, culture, language,
spirituality into this story. He elevated the o Sage as
(25:45):
the heart of the story. The costume designs were incorporated
with Osage consultants that provided the accuracy that was necessary
to capture how Osage is dressed during that period of time,
how Osa just spoke during that period of time, what
made them laugh? You know, that collaboration allowed the presence
(26:08):
of the people to make a meaningful contribution to the story.
However dark it is, at least the viewer who sits
through this will know the humanity of the Osage people. Yeah,
and I think he succeeded in that. This movie. Is
(26:28):
it going to change the world, I doubt it, but
it's going to hopefully start a conversation about how we
got here.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
After the break, I'll be talking to Jim Roan Gray
about the O Sage community today, the impact of the
reign of terror and the lessons we should all learn
from what happened. We're back. I was speaking to Jim
(27:04):
Roan Gray. So you became the i think the youngest
principal chief of the O Sage nation in two thousand
and two, served until twenty ten. What did that role
entail and why do you want it?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Well, the nineteen oh six Act did a couple of things.
Besides protecting us with the mineral estate. That gets all
the attention. What never got enough attention, in my opinion,
was the fact that when they issued out those two
hundred and twenty nine shares to those O Sages on
the rolls, they closed the roles by federal law. They
(27:38):
closed them. So in the eyes of the federal law,
the only O Sages they recognized were those original allottees.
And injustice had occurred where one fourth of O Sages
were considered members of the tribe while three fourths of
the Osages were not, simply because they did not have
(27:58):
an interest in the Osage mineral estate, which was something
that their parents had. And so fast forward to two
thousand and two, I'm running for chief and we only
have nine original Lattees still alive. An open question was
raised as to what would happen to the Osage Nations
relationship with the United States if the last original Lattee
(28:22):
passes away, because that part of the Osage Allotment Act
had never been amended over those last one hundred years.
And so I ran on the issue of addressing that issue,
and members of the tribal Council who also ran for
a seat on the council, also ran on an issue,
(28:44):
and in that election, nine out of the ten elected
positions in the tribe were turned out and replaced with
people who had that reform minded message of fixing that
membership issue. And so that created the change that allowed
(29:05):
all these sages who had been left off the rolls
for generations to say, sudden they come back on and
not just governed under a structure that was imposed on
them in nineteen oh six, but a part of a
government that includes them in a constitution that recognizes their
active involvement in the tribe and provisions in a constitution
(29:29):
that prioritizes language and land and cultural preservation. It's the
constitution that Osages wrote, not the one that the United
States wrote. And so when you allow the tribe to
reorganize under its own sovereignty, what you ended up with
as a tribe that was more bent on unity than
it was on divisiveness, that was more interested in culture
(29:53):
and language preservation than about the oil and gas industry
and the priorities of the tribe. With all these new
voices in the room, has made the Osage Nation a
completely different place than what it was in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
What do you think Henry Rohan would have made of
all this if he could see it?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Man, that's a good question. I just don't think he
ever had a chance to dream of a future beyond
what was his present. I just trying to imagine being
boarded on a railroad card taking him a thousand miles
(30:38):
away from his home, in this environment where he was
just slave labor and treated like a second class citizen.
I just I feel just sad that these policies damaged
in a lot of lives. And I'm not just talking
about my great grandfather. I'm talking about generations of Indian
(31:02):
people across the United States, not just o Sages. I
just I just feel like his the system failed him
in many many ways, and the fact that his great
grandson went on to become a chief is one. I
hoped that he would take some pride in that I
(31:23):
was able to accomplish as much as I did while
I was chief. He might have some pride in that.
I don't know, I hope he would have.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
When you look around you at the oce Age community today,
can you still trace the impact of the reign of
terror from the nineteen twenties? Is it still having an effect?
Speaker 2 (31:43):
When I was chief, the previous chief had already filed
a lawsuit in federal court claiming a breach of the
trust relationship between the United States and the Osage Nation.
And in this federal court of claims, the burden of
proved fell on the Sage is to prove there was mismanagement.
We were able to systematically prove that they consistently, over decades,
(32:08):
fil to get the highest yield of oil. What money
they did collect, did they invested in the places that
would maximize the benefit of that before the money was
paid out to the individuals. And we were able to
prove that they failed to do that. And so in
the years that took place from the nineteen oh six
(32:30):
Act to the time I was chief. In the two thousands,
we were talking about one hundred years right, the United
States finally agreed to settle somewhere close to four hundred
million dollars. It was a mixed blessing of sorts because
over those years, and through the actions of people like
William Hale and others who had found a way to
(32:53):
get their hands on osage head right shares, I think
twenty five percent of the osage head rights are now
in non osage hands today. So when we achieved this
historic settlement, imagine how it hit O Sage is Knowing
that one fourth of that settlement went to non O
(33:14):
Sage entities. That hurt a lot of people's sense of justice.
That we're still not there yet.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And how are people processing what happened and what has
continued to happen on a more personal level. You've given
us the legal picture in the political picture, but families
are also of course having to talk about or not
talk about, what was done.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
A lot of them don't to just wallow in the
suffering of what happened. Isn't going to bring anybody joy.
What good is that going to serve? As my mom
would say. I think what she tried to encourage me
to do was to, you know, not forget it, but
don't let it define you. Take the experience of our
(34:02):
ancestors and try to live a better life for yourself,
for your family, for your tribe. Use it as a
foundation upon which we could build a better Osage nation.
That is the only healthy way to achieve some perspective.
(34:23):
I can certainly respect any decision any Osh has about
not wanting to come forward and talk about it. But
I've chosen to make myself available to folks like yourself
simply because I want your listeners to know that we
don't live like victims. Even though we were victims of
(34:44):
horrible crimes back then, we don't live like victims today.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Cautioning Tales is a podcast about learning from the mistakes
of the past. So what lessons should we learn both
from this narrow and horrible story of the reign of
terror and from the broader story of the Ice Age Nation.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Well, there was a spe each I heard from a
tribal elder from Canada. He said, you want us to assimilate,
You want us to integrate, You want us to be
a part of the larger society. And if you're asking
me to abandon everything that I knew to be true
my entire life so you can teach me your way,
(35:31):
I would ask you, if you truly want integration, then
you have to find a place in your world for
our world, because integration cannot be a one way street.
There has to be something of value that my community
has that you need, and until you can make room
(35:56):
for that, I will resist your attempts. My tribe has
established a way to coexist with the world around us
for eons before you even arrived here, and yet you
don't value any of that experience. Until that happens, I'm
going to have.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
To stay here.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
And I feel like that as a way to answer
your question, is that what can be learned from this
dark chapter is maybe a question I should ask you.
I've done my best to try to answer it for
my own people, But will society learn anything? There's another
question that I can't answer. No.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
I guess what really struck me the more I found
out about what happened in the nineteen twenties is that
not only did I not know any of this, I
had no idea what I didn't know. And the more
I find out, the more shaken I am by my
(37:01):
capacity to have not known things about history that I
should done. So I'm going to keep reading and listening
and trying to learn a bit more. I'm sure I'm
going to keep discovering stuff that I didn't know and
should have known all along.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Well, I think it's the start, and maybe you will
find others that will share that view, and hopefully it
could lead to some better outcomes in the future.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Let's hope. So, Jim Ron Gray, thank you so much
for talking to me.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Thank you for having me appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I've been talking to Jim Roan Gray, former principal chief
of the Osage Nation. Jim's great grandfather, Henry Roan is
played by William Below in the film Killers of the
Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Lily Gladstone,
Robert de Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio. The film is in
movie theaters now. We will be back again on our
(38:05):
regular schedule with another cautionary Tale on Friday, November tenth,
all about the importance of archives and the disastrous consequences
of failing to preserve them. Cautionary Tales is written by me,
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original
(38:28):
music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited
the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe,
Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemmy Saunders and Rufus Wright. The
show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Vital Mollard, John Schnaz,
(38:49):
Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at ward Or
Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends
and if you want to hear the showo ad free.
(39:10):
Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in
Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
Pushkin. This episode of Cautionary Tales is produced in association
with Apple Original Films. Their new movie, Killers of the
Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, is now in theaters
Osage County, Oklahoma. February nineteen twenty three. It's cold, very cold.
(00:43):
The Deputy Sheriff and town Marshal of Fairfax are on
the lookout for an abandoned car. When they see it
the bottom of a rocky valley, they walk down to investigate.
The driver is slumped over the steering wheel. Drunk, thinks
the deputy, and he says as much. But he's not drunk.
(01:04):
He's dead. The man's name is Henry Rohane. The school
he was forced to go to, made him cut his hair,
made him wear a suit, tried to beat his O
Sage identity out of him. It was a terrible experience,
but Henry roan had become rich thanks to his share
of the lucrative head rights that directed oil revenue to
(01:25):
the small number of people recognized as members of the
O Sage Nation. Now he's been shot through the back
of the head. There's no gun at the scene. This
is no suicide. It's murder, and the man who ordered
Henry Roan to be killed. Is the man who claimed
(01:46):
to be his best friend, a man who would be
a pall bearer at Roan's funeral. This is a follow
up to our previous episode about the reign of terror
which afflicted the O Sage people in nineteen twenty's Oklahoma.
Members of the Osage were picked off to gain control
(02:06):
of the oil which lay under their land. Others, such
as Henry Rohan, were targeted as part of other equally
dreadful schemes. My telling of the story owed a great
deal to David Grand's book Killers of the Flower Moon
and focused on what happened to a single family. If
you haven't listened to that yet, I suggest you do.
(02:29):
But this is more than the story of Molly Burkhardt
and her murdered sisters and mother, Anna, Rita, Minnie and Lizzie.
Countless O Sage people lost their lives, and many of
the murders have never been solved. Even more, O Sage
were swindled out of their land and exploited by a
racist structure that treated them as incompetence. The impact on
(02:52):
the community has left a mark for generations. I'm Tim
Harford and you're listening to a special episode of Cautionary Tales.
(03:24):
Killers of the Flower Moon has been adapted into a
film by director Martin Scorsese and is out in theaters now.
Scorsese's longtime collaborator, Robert Naniro plays William K. Hale, the
man who orchestrated the murders of Molly Burkhardt's sisters and mother.
But Hale was also found guilty of murdering Henry Roan,
(03:44):
and it was Roan's death that led FBI agent Tom
White to key clues that helped him crack the case.
Henry Rohan's great grandson is Jim Roan Gray. Jim is
a former principal chief of the o s Age Nation,
and I'm delighted to say he joins me now. Jim
Roan Gray, Welcome to caution Me Tales.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Well, we're so glad that you could join us. And Jim,
I know you were born in Ocege County, but then
you moved to Denver, Colorado as a child and stayed
there until you were a teenager. So how much had
you been told about the Osage reign of terror when
you were growing up.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
To be honest, I think that many osay, just not
just my mom, just didn't talk about those things that
happened in the twenties. My mom, Henry Room's granddaughter, was
born a couple of years after he was murdered, so
the fact that she named me after him did give
her reason to say his name won't be forgotten in
(04:43):
the family and his story will hopefully continue to be told.
But after we moved back to Oklahoma, there was a
broadcast of the FBI story which was on.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Television and this is a movie.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah, it was a movie. It was a bit of
a propaganda to raise the profile of the FBI, and
it was based in nineteen fifty nine, two years before
I was born. And it was a show is starring
Jimmy Stewart playing the FBI investigator who went down to
Osage Country to crack the case of the Osage murders.
(05:17):
But in their version, it was a fictional tribe, no
connection to the Osage at all. But they kept Henry
Run's name. Why they used Henry Run's name and left
it in there and kept all the Osage elements out.
I have no idea you're.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Watching this movie, which is a puff piece for the FBI,
that is about the suffering of a tribe, even though
they've changed the name, and is about this FBI investigation.
So you know, what did you learn from that? What
did it feel like watching it?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Well, of course I recognized the name, but I was
a high school kid at the time. I was just
a kid, you know, I knew who I was named after.
So that gave an inkling of my exposure to this
story in our family. The sad party is is that,
you know, I just felt like I was not quite
as connected to it because the FBI from their point
(06:10):
of view, It wasn't from my point of view or
my mom's or my tribes. It was the FBI. They
solved all the crimes in o Sage Country and they left,
so not much to take from that if you're in
the Osage you know what I'm saying. Now. As I
grew to be a young man, I started doing my
own research and started reading books that had already been
published at that time in the nineteen eighties and nineties
(06:32):
and two thousands that helped fill in the gaps, so
to speak.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
It has extraordinary that you were having to teach yourself
about the history of what had happened.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Many Osage families just did not want to talk about it,
I think for many reasons, some of which were based
on those that survived that period of time. The FBI
came and they investigated these murders, and they brought justice
to a couple of individuals who had committed these crimes,
and then they left. What continued to happen in O
(07:05):
Sage country is that people continued to die. Their life
and wealth and land were all taken in various ways.
The Osages came into an enormous amount of money in
a very short period of time, and it was concentrated
within a couple of thousand people. The Osa just suddenly
fell into a higher income status that developed a fair
(07:30):
amount of resentment among the rest of the population around us.
Newspaper journalists of the day would write about the extravagant
spending habits of certain O Sages, implying that all Osages
were doing that and generating an enormous amount of interest
in this, both good and bad, and all kinds of
(07:51):
elements descended into the Osage community, bent on getting a
cut of the action in whatever means they felt they
could get away with. Some were store owners that issued
credit to O Sages and overcharged exorbitant prices for basic
everyday items like say, a hammer would cost one hundred
(08:11):
dollars in nineteen twenty dollars, which would have put it
somewhere over one thousand dollars today, and the BIA would
just pay these bills and suddenly put these O Sages
into debt, and these store owners would say, hey, this
guy owes me money you can't pay, and they settle
the debt by giving their sage land to these individuals,
(08:33):
and they became credibly wealthy by doing that. Definitely, a
fair amount of white collar crime was occurring under those
federal policies of the day that allowed people the luxury
of being able to direct the spending of O Sage
money as well as who eventually inherited the Osage money,
and there was a practice of marrying into the tribe
(08:56):
that gave people enormous influence over that. But also the
guardian systems that were imposed on O Sages who were
half led O Sage or more every aspect of their
life in terms of what they could spend money on,
where they lived, where they shopped, who they hung out
with everything was under the control of this guardian. This
(09:18):
interest to the Osay just coming into that wealth created
an incentive to kill osages for their money.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I want to ask about your great grandfather, Henry Rohman.
He was born, I think a little bit before the
oil was discovered. Taught me through what you've learned about
him and the situation he faced as he was growing up.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
One of the things that happened during that period of
time after the so called Indian Wars of that era,
Little Big Warned Wounded Knee and Chief Joseph and the
Nez person Geronimo, and all these stories that came from
Indian resistance. We saw a very hostile set of federal
(10:01):
policies towards tribes and individual Indians, of punishment of some
kind for just be an Indian. Lot of federal policies
were bent on not only breaking up the collective landholdings
of all the tribes through a process called allotment, but
also the breakup of their tribal governments. So they were
(10:22):
powerless really to defend themselves, to protect themselves, to advance
their interest. And then adding to it one last piece,
which was assimilation. And this is where they actually took
children out of their homes, oftentimes against the will of
their parents, and send them off to these re education
camps called Indian boarding schools. They were there for years
(10:46):
without much communication back to their families, and their clothes
were burned, they were replaced with military uniforms, their hair
was shaved, and they were paraded around in these photographs
of kind of before and after pictures that these schools
used to perpetuate the success of the program. What was
(11:10):
behind those photographs was a series of beatings for Indian
children who spoke their language. They were forced into servitude
to local families that lived in the area to do
menial labor. They were abused, some were molested, some were raped,
some committed suicide. Some tried to run away and were
(11:31):
beaten severely. This was also something that the o Sage
families went through as well.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
And that's what happened to your great grandfather, Henry Rown.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
My great grandfather, was one such story. He spent his
early years of his life in a boarding school in Pennsylvania,
which is about one thousand miles away. He spent I
think seven years there, basically robbed of a traditional Osage upbringing,
and not really having much of a human connection. And
(12:01):
I don't know whether or not he was beaten or
molested or any of that. I do know that through
some historical docum imments it was pretty clear he just
wanted to be left alone when he got back.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, I'm looking at a photograph of him now as
a schoolboy with short hair, and he's wearing a suit
and he's wearing a tie. I'm sure you've seen the
same photograph. And what it says to you when you
see that image.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Well, they tried to remove the osage that was a
part of him and turn him into something else, often
against his will. So I think that the image that
tells me is that he probably didn't have the agency
(12:48):
to be able to make his own choices about whether
or not he wanted to be there. Yeah, you know,
he married and had a family, but I feel like
he struggled with his identity. And I think that's one
of the outcomes of the boarding school experience is that
not just Henry Rohan, but Indian children throughout the United
States who went this experience came back I guess you
(13:12):
could say damaged and not really fitting into the traditional
Indian world. That they came from, but certainly not fitting
into the white world because to them they were just
another Indian. Henry's just one of many stories from that
period of time, and others were treated worse and some
never survived that experience. So the fact that he came back,
(13:36):
you know, albeit maybe confused or a worse damaged because
of it. Psychologically, it struggled to reclaim his O sage identities.
You can tell as he's a young man. There's a
picture of him where he's grown his hair out. You know,
he's refusing to allow that boarding school experience to fine him.
(13:59):
And I take some measure of comfort and knowing that
that policy failed to achieve its goals, but it did
lead to other unfortunate events that happened to him later
in life. Henry row never got the therapy that he deserved, yeah,
(14:19):
to recover from that experience.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
I'm speaking to Jim Roan Gray and after the break,
I'll be talking to Jim about how his great grandfather,
Henry Rohan got to know the murderous mastermind William K. Hale.
Cautionary tales will be back in just a moment. Jim,
(14:47):
you've described your great grandfather being taken away to this
boarding school where he was subject to this process of
trying to force him to assimilate. It's a thousand miles
away from his family, and then he comes back and
he's and you use the word damaged. You also told
us that you have all of these characters circle Osage
(15:10):
Country trying to one way or another get in on
the oil money. That brings us to William Hale and
his relationship with Henry Rohan.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I could see the value that Hale got out of
being friends with Henry Ron. I''m not sure what value
Henry got out of being friends with William Hale other
than the fact that this was a white, very popular,
charismatic person in the community that had a lot of friends.
You know, not just Henry Rowan, but many Osage just
(15:41):
considered him a friend. During those days before the Reign of.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Terror, William Hale was a poll bearer at your great
grandfather's funeral and claimed to be a close friend. And
yet all the time he had been moving behind the
scenes to take advantage of Henry. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
He claims he loaned money to Henry Ron and that
was the justification for him taking the life insurance policy
out on him. The attitude of white people towards Indians.
It wasn't subtle, We'll just say that. And for him
to make the claim, William hal had to shop his
(16:20):
life insurance policy around to several different insurance providers. And
the reason is that it looked like a setup and
he was being set up. William Hale played on Henry's
emotions by saying that his wife was cheating on him
with a local white man in town. He claims he
(16:40):
was doing his friend of favor by letting him know.
I just know that the entire characterization of Henry Roan
has been bred into this story by the person who
ordered his killing, and I'm inclined to not take his
word for any of this. Maybe Henry Roan heard something
(17:02):
that he shouldn't have. And there's also rumors that there
was a traditional wedding between Molly Burkhardt and Henry Rown
years before she ever met Ernest.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
So let me get this straight. Your great grandfather might
have been married to Molly before she married William Hale's
nephew Ernest Burkhardt, and could potentially make a claim to
the Headwright that William Hale was plotting to secure for himself.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
They did organize marriages back in those days. It wasn't uncommon,
but given the times and what Henry had gone through
at Carlisle Boarding School in Pennsylvania, the marriage didn't succeed
and they went their different ways. A traditional marriage could
be something that Henry Rohan could make a claim for.
I don't know. I mean, there's lots of theories about
(17:52):
that relationship, some of which we'll never know. One's only
left to speculate.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah, you've alluded that to Henry struggling to settle into
married life, and like many people who survived the boarding
school system, he wasn't known to drink, and William Hale
played on that, didn't he.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
My view is that to take William Hale's account of
the worth and value of Henry Rohan's life would be
stupid because he's using it to defend himself. I mean,
the fact that this case went through so many different
courts and had to be retried multiple times before they
ever got around it getting him convicted speaks a lot
(18:31):
to mainstream society's perception of the value of Indian people's lives.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah, Hale had arranged somehow to be the beneficiary of
Henry Rohan's life insurance policy, and then Hale had his
cronious murder Henry Rohan. So what I'm hearing from you
is everything else that was said about Henry Rohan's drinking
and maybe there was an affair, and maybe this and
maybe that. Yeah, well maybe, but we can't rely on
(19:00):
any of that because that's all the snake screen for
the bald fact of the case.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Exactly right.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
But those facts did, in the end put Tom White
of the Buereau of Investigations onto the case. That seemed
to be a very important step in the unlocking of
the murders that were solved. I hear what you said
that not all the murders were sold by any means,
but it was important in putting Hale behind bars in
the end.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Well, you got to understand too, that it wasn't until
nineteen twenty four, a year after Henrion was murdered, that
the United States recognized the indigenous communities in this country
as US citizens. And so it wasn't just bad people,
it was bad federal policy with assimilation, allotment, the breakup
(19:46):
of tribal governments, and the fact that we were one
of the last people in this country to get recognized
as being US citizens. We were inferior, We were subhuman.
We weren't entitled to anything other than suffering and being
at the beck and call of people who believed in
(20:07):
the manifest destiny of God gave us this right to
colonize this entire continent, even if it came at the
expense of millions of indigenous people who got in the
way of that. There was still that mentality that existed
and not a pretty chapter in American history. But this
(20:28):
movie is bringing a lot of these elements into light now.
I want to make sure that your listeners understand that
our resilience and our stubbornness got us through that, and
our willingness to adopt certain aspects of the dominant culture
and accept them as part of a way of life,
(20:52):
but not giving in entirely to all the things that
made us o sage is what helped us survive that
period of time. And as we modernized our tribal government
years later, when I was chief, we were able to
prioritize the resources of our tribe to invest in the
(21:14):
health and education and the cultural and language preservation initiatives
that resulted in our ability to collaborate with Scorsese in
such a way that showcased the oce age culture as
an elemental part, almost literally a character in this film
that retained the dignity of our people and respect for
(21:37):
the ancestors who were tragically murdered during that period of time.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, I mean, you must have heard about the book
Killers of the Flower Moon, the bestseller, and then you
hear Martin Scorsese wants to make it into a film.
How did that feel when you heard that was happening.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
It was kind of a one two punch. Actually, the
movie rights were sold before the book even became public.
The reader's interest in this story was overwhelming, and it
became the number one bookseller on Amazon that year, and
it was heralded as a very important piece of literature
and a true crime story that was largely forgotten in
(22:15):
the pages of history. And so David Grant had brought
all of this to light. And then word got out
that Martin Scorsese had read the book and expressed an
interest in making this into a film, and the people
had legitimate concerns. Hollywood as an industry doesn't have a
(22:36):
very good track record of telling indigenous stories accurately. Many
of us worried that in Scorsese's hand, the violence might
overtake the story, and we wanted to express our concerns
about o sages who were descendants of the people who
were murdered, like myself, got together and wrote to Scorsese
(23:00):
and said, we would like to meet with you and
talk about what your intentions are with this film, how
our answertors are going to be treated in the story.
This is a painful story for our people. We would
like to invite you to break bread with us, eat
here with us, and meet with us in our community.
And just Coorsese's credit, he did come, and he brought
(23:23):
his whole team with him, just not just himself, but
all the people that has worked on his films going
back decades.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
What did he say to him.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Well, that was obviously starstruck, just like everyone else. I mean,
he's only eight feet away from me, and I'm talking
to a group of one hundred and fifty oh sages
in the room, and each one of us were a
little uncomfortable, you know, but we got over it. I
talked to him from a standpoint of just there are
(23:54):
elements of this story that are in this book that
are historically accurate, but the O Sage culture as how
we saw the world and how we interact with one another,
and how we deal with crisis, and how we cling
to our culture using the resources that we had at
(24:14):
the time as a way to achieve the resilience that
was needed to get through that period of time. That
wasn't contained in the book, but it is found in
this room, in the lives and the stories of the
descendants of those that were victims of that period of
time of those crimes. I told him, you have an
opportunity to do something that Hollywood hasn't done before, or
(24:36):
your industry hasn't done before. Other famous movies of the past,
like Dances with Wolve's Little Big Man and Last the
Mohicans were all written by non Indians and a fictionalized
story about what happened to those tribes, and it had
this white savior element to it, you know, And none
of those things are present in this story. And nobody
(24:59):
in this room wants you to fail to the extent
that you'll let us. We want to help you in
every way we can. And I ended the statement with
be the director to make that film, be the director
to make that film that your industry will point to
in the future and say that's the one we got. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Do you think he succeeded?
Speaker 2 (25:22):
From my experience, he honored his word when he said
he would work the script and he would consult with
the tribe, and he did, in fact consult with the
tribe and integrated enormous amounts of Osage art, culture, language,
spirituality into this story. He elevated the o Sage as
(25:45):
the heart of the story. The costume designs were incorporated
with Osage consultants that provided the accuracy that was necessary
to capture how Osage is dressed during that period of time,
how Osa just spoke during that period of time, what
made them laugh? You know, that collaboration allowed the presence
(26:08):
of the people to make a meaningful contribution to the story.
However dark it is, at least the viewer who sits
through this will know the humanity of the Osage people. Yeah,
and I think he succeeded in that. This movie. Is
(26:28):
it going to change the world, I doubt it, but
it's going to hopefully start a conversation about how we
got here.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
After the break, I'll be talking to Jim Roan Gray
about the O Sage community today, the impact of the
reign of terror and the lessons we should all learn
from what happened. We're back. I was speaking to Jim
(27:04):
Roan Gray. So you became the i think the youngest
principal chief of the O Sage nation in two thousand
and two, served until twenty ten. What did that role
entail and why do you want it?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Well, the nineteen oh six Act did a couple of things.
Besides protecting us with the mineral estate. That gets all
the attention. What never got enough attention, in my opinion,
was the fact that when they issued out those two
hundred and twenty nine shares to those O Sages on
the rolls, they closed the roles by federal law. They
(27:38):
closed them. So in the eyes of the federal law,
the only O Sages they recognized were those original allottees.
And injustice had occurred where one fourth of O Sages
were considered members of the tribe while three fourths of
the Osages were not, simply because they did not have
(27:58):
an interest in the Osage mineral estate, which was something
that their parents had. And so fast forward to two
thousand and two, I'm running for chief and we only
have nine original Lattees still alive. An open question was
raised as to what would happen to the Osage Nations
relationship with the United States if the last original Lattee
(28:22):
passes away, because that part of the Osage Allotment Act
had never been amended over those last one hundred years.
And so I ran on the issue of addressing that issue,
and members of the tribal Council who also ran for
a seat on the council, also ran on an issue,
(28:44):
and in that election, nine out of the ten elected
positions in the tribe were turned out and replaced with
people who had that reform minded message of fixing that
membership issue. And so that created the change that allowed
(29:05):
all these sages who had been left off the rolls
for generations to say, sudden they come back on and
not just governed under a structure that was imposed on
them in nineteen oh six, but a part of a
government that includes them in a constitution that recognizes their
active involvement in the tribe and provisions in a constitution
(29:29):
that prioritizes language and land and cultural preservation. It's the
constitution that Osages wrote, not the one that the United
States wrote. And so when you allow the tribe to
reorganize under its own sovereignty, what you ended up with
as a tribe that was more bent on unity than
it was on divisiveness, that was more interested in culture
(29:53):
and language preservation than about the oil and gas industry
and the priorities of the tribe. With all these new
voices in the room, has made the Osage Nation a
completely different place than what it was in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
What do you think Henry Rohan would have made of
all this if he could see it?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Man, that's a good question. I just don't think he
ever had a chance to dream of a future beyond
what was his present. I just trying to imagine being
boarded on a railroad card taking him a thousand miles
(30:38):
away from his home, in this environment where he was
just slave labor and treated like a second class citizen.
I just I feel just sad that these policies damaged
in a lot of lives. And I'm not just talking
about my great grandfather. I'm talking about generations of Indian
(31:02):
people across the United States, not just o Sages. I
just I just feel like his the system failed him
in many many ways, and the fact that his great
grandson went on to become a chief is one. I
hoped that he would take some pride in that I
(31:23):
was able to accomplish as much as I did while
I was chief. He might have some pride in that.
I don't know, I hope he would have.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
When you look around you at the oce Age community today,
can you still trace the impact of the reign of
terror from the nineteen twenties? Is it still having an effect?
Speaker 2 (31:43):
When I was chief, the previous chief had already filed
a lawsuit in federal court claiming a breach of the
trust relationship between the United States and the Osage Nation.
And in this federal court of claims, the burden of
proved fell on the Sage is to prove there was mismanagement.
We were able to systematically prove that they consistently, over decades,
(32:08):
fil to get the highest yield of oil. What money
they did collect, did they invested in the places that
would maximize the benefit of that before the money was
paid out to the individuals. And we were able to
prove that they failed to do that. And so in
the years that took place from the nineteen oh six
(32:30):
Act to the time I was chief. In the two thousands,
we were talking about one hundred years right, the United
States finally agreed to settle somewhere close to four hundred
million dollars. It was a mixed blessing of sorts because
over those years, and through the actions of people like
William Hale and others who had found a way to
(32:53):
get their hands on osage head right shares, I think
twenty five percent of the osage head rights are now
in non osage hands today. So when we achieved this
historic settlement, imagine how it hit O Sage is Knowing
that one fourth of that settlement went to non O
(33:14):
Sage entities. That hurt a lot of people's sense of justice.
That we're still not there yet.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And how are people processing what happened and what has
continued to happen on a more personal level. You've given
us the legal picture in the political picture, but families
are also of course having to talk about or not
talk about, what was done.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
A lot of them don't to just wallow in the
suffering of what happened. Isn't going to bring anybody joy.
What good is that going to serve? As my mom
would say. I think what she tried to encourage me
to do was to, you know, not forget it, but
don't let it define you. Take the experience of our
(34:02):
ancestors and try to live a better life for yourself,
for your family, for your tribe. Use it as a
foundation upon which we could build a better Osage nation.
That is the only healthy way to achieve some perspective.
(34:23):
I can certainly respect any decision any Osh has about
not wanting to come forward and talk about it. But
I've chosen to make myself available to folks like yourself
simply because I want your listeners to know that we
don't live like victims. Even though we were victims of
(34:44):
horrible crimes back then, we don't live like victims today.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Cautioning Tales is a podcast about learning from the mistakes
of the past. So what lessons should we learn both
from this narrow and horrible story of the reign of
terror and from the broader story of the Ice Age Nation.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Well, there was a spe each I heard from a
tribal elder from Canada. He said, you want us to assimilate,
You want us to integrate, You want us to be
a part of the larger society. And if you're asking
me to abandon everything that I knew to be true
my entire life so you can teach me your way,
(35:31):
I would ask you, if you truly want integration, then
you have to find a place in your world for
our world, because integration cannot be a one way street.
There has to be something of value that my community
has that you need, and until you can make room
(35:56):
for that, I will resist your attempts. My tribe has
established a way to coexist with the world around us
for eons before you even arrived here, and yet you
don't value any of that experience. Until that happens, I'm
going to have.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
To stay here.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
And I feel like that as a way to answer
your question, is that what can be learned from this
dark chapter is maybe a question I should ask you.
I've done my best to try to answer it for
my own people, But will society learn anything? There's another
question that I can't answer. No.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
I guess what really struck me the more I found
out about what happened in the nineteen twenties is that
not only did I not know any of this, I
had no idea what I didn't know. And the more
I find out, the more shaken I am by my
(37:01):
capacity to have not known things about history that I
should done. So I'm going to keep reading and listening
and trying to learn a bit more. I'm sure I'm
going to keep discovering stuff that I didn't know and
should have known all along.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Well, I think it's the start, and maybe you will
find others that will share that view, and hopefully it
could lead to some better outcomes in the future.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Let's hope. So, Jim Ron Gray, thank you so much
for talking to me.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Thank you for having me appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I've been talking to Jim Roan Gray, former principal chief
of the Osage Nation. Jim's great grandfather, Henry Roan is
played by William Below in the film Killers of the
Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Lily Gladstone,
Robert de Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio. The film is in
movie theaters now. We will be back again on our
(38:05):
regular schedule with another cautionary Tale on Friday, November tenth,
all about the importance of archives and the disastrous consequences
of failing to preserve them. Cautionary Tales is written by me,
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original
(38:28):
music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited
the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe,
Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemmy Saunders and Rufus Wright. The
show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Vital Mollard, John Schnaz,
(38:49):
Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at ward Or
Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends
and if you want to hear the showo ad free.
(39:10):
Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in
Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
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