David Grann, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” (Vintage, 2017)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Mar 26, 2018 · 30m

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

In Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Vintage, 2018) author and New Yorker staff writer David Grann (The Lost City of Z) narrates why and how, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned…