OSAGE HILLS

THE VIEW FROM TULSA

Fate decreed my Oklahoma birth. But it was my choice to watch “Killers of the Flower Moon”, the film by Martin Scorsese about the murders on Osage land in Oklahoma during the 1920’s. I watched it at home, on Apple, not in the theatre.  The movie took three and a half hours to tell its story. My life, since my birth in Tulsa, has taken what feels like about the same amount of time to reach this point, where I’m writing this essay, maybe a little less.

I used to read scripts for Scorsese, during the “Goodfellas” era. Then years later, I ‘produced’ a project in partnership with Scorsese and his amanuensis Leonardo DiCaprio, whom those who know call ‘Leo’. 

It was an idea of my origination with a writer developing with me with exactly this participation from Scorsese: he showed me and the writer three movies as patterns to consider. He screened in his screening room “The Rise to Power of Louis the 14th” by Rossellini, “Salvatore Giuliani” and “Lucky Luciano” by Francesco Nero. The barbershop murder scene in “Luciano” showed Luciano’s gunmen in long dusters a la Woody Strode in “Once Upon a Time in the West” and in slow motion a la Peckinpaugh in “The Wild Bunch” assassinating mafiosi during the putsch that achieved full control of the Mob for Luciano.

I jumped up and down in my seat shouting, “Fuck, fuck, fuck”. Scorcese, asthma inhaler in hand, vaulted three rows of seats to shout in my ear -

-See! See! We all copied Nero!

Of course the project came to nothing. The impetus - to tell the origin story of the Camorra - appeared in vestigial form in “Boardwalk Empire”, much transposed. Oh well.

Somewhere among his documentaries and hortatory lectures about the nature of film, the narrative impulse in Scorsese’s storytelling softened and relaxed so that rather than vicious punches in painful closeup the relaxed unfolding of action seemed to take place not in narrative time, not in historical time, but in a fluid medium, like a river, were events are content to eddy then disappear until we arrive at - in this most recent movie - the climax, where Scorsese appears to tell us what it meant. 

In my case what the movie means comes down to the truth of the woman Lily Gladstone plays: Lily Gladstone’s performance embodies the Osage legacy. She turned an underwritten part into a natural force, like the thunderstorm in the picture. The words she said could never have matched the magic her silence evokes. Because if nothing else, the documentary accuracy of the images, rituals and Osage actors made the film into something more and less than a movie, more documentary, less feature fiction film. I think of Flaherty, but I also think back to the smack and tang that Scorsese’s movie-making used to have.

But this isn’t a review. Rather the film made me think about Osage County as I saw it growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  One of my relatives worked for Fred Sinclair, one of the early lease holders of Osage land. So I was told when we made trips to the Woolaroc Museum, the Frank Phillips ranch turned into a museum and nature preserve. It was 45 miles from Tulsa, near Bartlesville. On its grounds ranged longhorn cattle and buffalo that looked wild. A giant bear, like Faulkner’s “Bear”, loomed in taxidermic limbo in the opening lobby, lit to revive the bear to its full, living fury. In death and death’s repose that bear excites my memory with its frisson of awe and terror even at this distance of years.

As the years ground into the ordinary discontents of adolescence I would drive outside Tulsa to the edge of the Osage Hills which the viewing lounge of the Thomas Gilcrease Museum opened onto. This Museum you probably won’t see. Yet its collection preserves rather than despoils. I’ve spent good time in their archives.

In Tulsa, a lot of my classmates were First People, and not just Osage. Quill Halfbreed was Cherokee. Jess Hair was Kiowa, and got me into several scrapes but had the gift to get us out of them. I miss Jess. 

My dad worked for a pipeline, and as a “college boy” I worked summers “walking the line”. One summer I graduated to writing a Safety Manual in the air-conditioned comfort of the Head Office. The summer before I had worked outside the Head Office, hacking through asphalt and rocks sinking a hole to accommodate a telephone switching station. This we did in 110 degree Fahrenheit temperatures and almost as much humidity. I remember watching my father and his cohort peering from inside, where it’s air-conditioned, through the shaded windows, pointing at us and laughing.

Now I was on the inside. I managed to stretch writing the manual to last the entire summer. I also brought some books to read during lunch. One was lyrical anthropology much in fashion in the Seventies, specifically Frank Waters and his “Masked Gods”.

One of the Engineers picked up the book while I ate a sandwich. He called me “College Boy” and mentioned in an undertone that he was a drummer in the Osage peyote ceremonies, the one’s sanctioned when the US Government legalised the rites of the New American Religion.  

That was nice of them, considering that previous rites varied from tribe to tribe, and featured, as it did in Osage tribal ritual, days of ceremonies until soldiers, smallpox, and starvation decimated the Tribes.

The Osage rituals derived from the 12 clans, each originating from a clan animal. My friend told me that now only enough Osage survived to constitute three proper clans in the Old Way. So the adoption of new rituals happened in the crisis of the last days of tribal freedom before and after settlements mostly compelled by the appalling loss of life and livelihood. There was the Sun Dance, the Ghost Dance which was an apocalyptic response to Genocide. Sitting Bull was murdered outside a Ghost Dance. 

My interlocutor favoured a gentler way, the only way whereby what he knew might survive. Notwithstanding his trad suburban demeanour at set times each year he met the Osage deities and kept the Spirit alive.

My friend taught me making a home for the Spirit in one’s life was a pragmatic matter of dogged belief in the face of dispiriting change. It was an ironic shade this memory cast on the florid melodrama of the Scorsese movie.

These murders, like the Tulsa Race Riots in 1921, happened because in Oklahoma and elsewhere law can be bought or silenced, then erased. There and then, but even now, the good old boys make their own law, whether they wear hoods, bring ropes, or wear judges robes and police uniforms. They have the right to bear arms. They are the law.

It fascinates me how the FBI, which originated in this era of the Osage murders, had to turn to experienced gunmen from the frontier West, from Texas. They lent J. Edgar Hoover the service of their frontier guns to enforce laws that without their dead eye amounted to just so many empty words.

That was the case in the murder of Dillinger in Chicago where outside the Biograph Cinema in Near North a former Texas Ranger punctuated the line between law and order when he shot Dillinger and his mythical cock dead. There the myth ended and began, all at once.

But that’s a romantic notion. Lawlessness buys justice. Justice is an efflorescence, a rarity, a flower that blooms maybe once every few years. And will it be better when the judges are replaced with AI, just as the lawyers have been?

Genocide still does big business. Slavery may be illegal, but the land we ‘own’ was stolen by our ancestors long enough ago that title and statute no longer apply. 

The mechanisms of apocalypse work with greater efficiency now. The walls of our gated communities are built higher and stronger, and improved surveillance and health services keep violence and death as far away as technology allows, provided you have the cash to buy a place inside those walls.

There’s no ideal, no particular myth that justifies the aggressive aggregation of power. Consequently, there’s no real argument to be made against the many deputised militias bent on taking what remains of our livelihoods and freedom to provide the Ruling Class the remainder of what it has not already banked or what it does not already own. 

The Great Spirit? Like the Great Society, gone. The Good Society? You tell me. Where are we headed? Ask this guy named Hobbes. He has a map. All the other ones look out of date.

Something about “red in tooth and claw.”

But there is hope. There’s “Radical Hope”, a book by philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear that chronicles the destruction and despair of the Crow people when their buffalo were killed, their land taken, and their culture suffocated to death. 

Lear looks closely at the person of “Plenty Coups”, the last great Crow Chief before their nomadic way of life ended and they were confined to the reservation without their culture or livelihood. It’s an unlikely book because Lear does not content himself to stop the story at its tragedy but persists in telling how Plenty Coups’ story provides something Lear calls “Radical Hope.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/04/26/a-different-kind-of-courage/ 

Next time.