Apple
Looking back on the film, what scenes stand out to you?
There’s a scene where Marty walks you through Mollie’s house. He goes in the front door, walks around the whole house and comes back to [matriarch and murder victim] Lizzie Q sitting on the daybed in the living room. It shows all this activity and Osage and white people together in this small house. There’s a life to it that excited me.
The other scene that really stood out for its location is at the very beginning of the film when Henry Roan is driving Ernest to the William Hale ranch. They’re on this long road and you see hundreds of oil derricks in the background. Ernest asks, “Whose land is this?” and Henry Roan says, “Mine.” I thought that was an important line for establishing the environment of that period.
Why was it important to be part of this groundbreaking film?
I love history, and a great part of our history in the United States is the Indigenous people who were here before Europeans arrived. This film encouraged me to learn more about treaties and how land was transferred away from Indigenous families to white settlers. There was this idea of manifest destiny—that God wanted us to have all this land or he wouldn’t have put it here. William Clark of Lewis and Clark felt so guilty about the treaty he signed with the Osage in 1825 that he said something to the effect of, “If I’m ever going to be damned, it’s for this treaty.” He’d cheated them, and he knew it. I’m always curious as to what the world would have become if the Indigenous people of North America were able to keep building and what we would have found if we came here to visit with our passports.
I’m also fascinated by how horrible man can be to man. Unless we can learn from our history, we’re just going to continue on this same path. We’ve got to somehow rise above and understand that we’re all in this together. Like Rodney King said, “Can’t we all get along?” It’s a heavy topic, and it happened in every country. And it’ll probably continue to happen because I don’t think people are really ready to admit that we might not always be right. But this is just the beginning, because there are millions of Indigenous stories that need to be told. I hope the film gives Indigenous people strength and that more of their stories get told and resonate with all of us, so that we can become better.
