Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Killers of the Flower Moon: Osage Chief Jim Gray In Conversation

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

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 [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Martin Scorsese is now in theaters. Osage County, Oklahoma, February 1923. It's cold, very cold. The deputy sheriff and town marshal of Fairfax were 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. He's dead. The man's name is Henry Rohn. The school he was forced to go to made him cut his hair, made him wear a suit, tried to beat his Osage identity out of him.

It was a terrible experience, but Henry Rohn had become rich thanks to his share of the lucrative headwrites, the directed oil revenue to the small number of people recognized as members of the Osage Nation. Now he's been shot to 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 Rowan to be killed is the man who claimed to be his best friend. A man who would be a Paul bearer at Rowan's funeral. a man who would be a Paul bearer at Rones Funeral. This is a follow-up to our previous episode about the reign of terror, which afflicted the Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma.

Members of the Osage were picked off to gain control of the oil, which lay under their land. Others, such as Henry Rohn, were targeted as part of other equally dreadful schemes. My telling of the story owed a great deal to David Gransburg, 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. But this is more than the story of Monty Birkhardt and her murdered sisters and mother, Anna, Rita, Mini, and Lizzie.

Countless Osage people lost their lives, and many of the murders have never been solved. Even more Osage were swindled out of their land and exploited by a racist structure that treated them as incompetence. The impact on the community has left a mark for generations. I'm Tim Haafard, and you're listening to a special episode of Corsion Retails. Killers of the Flower Moon has been adapted into a film by director Martin Scorsese and his out in theaters now. Scorsese's longtime collaborator Robert Naneiro plays William K. Hale, the man who orchestrated

the murders of Molly Burke, Hart's sisters and mother. But Hale was also found guilty of murdering Henry Rohn, and it was Rohn's death that led FBI agent Tom White to key clues that helped him crack the case. Henry Rohn's great grandson is Jim Rohn Gray. Jim is a former principal chief of the Ose age nation, and I'm delighted to say he joins me now. Jim Rohn Gray, welcome to Corsionary Tales. Glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Well, we're so glad that you could join us. Jim, I know you were born in Ose age county, but then you moved to Denver, Colorado, as a child and stayed there until you were teenager. So how much had you been told about the Osage reign of terror when you were growing up? To be honest, I think that many Osages, not just my mom, just didn't talk about those things that happened in the 20s. My mom, Henry Rome'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 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 television. there was a broadcast of the FBI story, which was on television. And this is a movie. Yeah, it was a movie. It was a bit of a propaganda to raise the profile of the FBI. And it was based in 1959, two years before I was born. And it was a showcase, a starring Jimmy Stewart,

playing the FBI investigator, who went down to Osage Country to crack the case of the Osage martyrs. But in their version, there was a fictional tribe, no connection to the Osage at all, but they kept Henry Rones' name, why they used Henry Rones' name and left it in there and kept all the Osage elements out. I have no idea. You're 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, what did you learn from that? What did it feel like watching it?

Well, of course, I recognized it. 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 part is that, you know, I just felt like I was not quite as connected to it, because the FBI told it from their point of view. It wasn't from my point of view, or my moms, or my tribes. It was the FBI. They solved all the crimes in Osage country and they left. So not much to take from that if you're 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 1980s and 90s and 2000s that helped fill in the gaps, sort of, speak. It is extraordinary that you were having to teach yourself about the history of what had happened. 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 Osage Country is that people continued to die. Their life and wealth and land were all taken in various ways. The OSA just 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 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

nosages, implying that all nosages were doing that. And generating an enormous amount of interest in this, both good and bad, and all kinds of elements descended into the Osage community been on getting a cut of the action and whatever means they felt they could get away with. Some were store owners that issued credit to Osages and overcharged, exorbitant prices for basic everyday items like say a hammer would cost a hundred dollars and nineteen twenty dollars, which would have put it somewhere over $1,000 today. And the BI would just pay these bills and suddenly put these osages into debt.

And these store owners would say, hey, this guy owes me money, he can't pay. They settled the debt by giving their osage land to these individuals. And they became incredibly 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 Osage money as well as who eventually inherited the Osage money. And there was a practice of marrying into the tribe

that gave people enormous influence over that, but also the guardian systems that were imposed on Osages who were half blood Osage or more, every aspect of their life in terms of what they could spend money on, where they lived, where they shop to, they hung out with, everything was under the control of the Guardian. This interest to the Ose just coming into that wealth, created an incentive to kill Ose just for their money. I wanted to ask about your great grandfather, Henry Rohn. He was born, I think, a little bit before the oil was discovered.

Right. Talked me through what you've learned about him and the situation he faced as he was growing up. One of the things that happened during that period of time, after the so-called Indian Wars of that era, little big war and wounded Neh and Chief Joseph and the Ness person, Geronimo and all these stories that came from Indian resistance. We saw a very hostile set of federal policies towards tribes and individual Indians of punishment of some kind for just being Indian.

A lot of federal policies were bent on not only breaking up the collective land holdings of all the tribes through a process called allotment, but also the breakup of their tribal governments. So they were 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 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 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 somewhere molested somewhere raped some committed suicide some tried to run away and were beaten severely This was also something that the Osage families went through as well. And that's what happened to your great-grandfather, Henry Rohn. My great-grandfather was one such story. He spent his early years of his life in a boarding school in Pennsylvania, which is about a thousand miles away. He spent spend I think seven years there, basically robbed of a traditional Osage upbringing, and not really having much of a human connection. And I don't know whether or not he was beaten or molested or any of that. I do know that through some historical

documents, it was pretty clear he just wanted to be left alone when he got back. Yeah. I mean, 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. I wonder what it says to you when you see that image. Well, they tried to remove the Osage that was a part of him and turn him into something else, often against as well. So I think that the image it tells me is that he probably didn't have the agency 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 Rohn, but Indian children throughout the United States who went through this experience came back. I guess you 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, you know, albeit maybe confused or at worst damaged because of it psychologically, it struggled to reclaim his and his Osage identity as 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 find him. And I take some measure of comfort in 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 Rohn never got the therapy that he deserved. Yeah. To recover from that experience.

I'm speaking to Jim Rohn Gray. And after the break, I'll be talking to Jim about how his great-grandfather, Henry Rohn, got to know the murderous mastermind William K. Hale. Corscht and me tales will be back in just a moment. Jim, 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.

There's a thousand miles away from his family. And then he comes back and he's, and he used the word, damaged. You also told us that you have all of these characters circling Oseh country, trying to one way or another, get it on the oil money. That brings us to William Hale and his relationship with Henry Rohn. I could see the value that Hale got out of being France with Henry Rohn. I'm not sure what value Henry got out of it being France 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 hanging around, but many of us ages considered him a friend during those days before the reign of terror. William Hale was a Paul Barra at your great grandfather's funeral and claimed to be a close friend. And yet all the time he'd been moving behind the scenes

to take advantage of Henry. Tell me about that. He claims he loaned money to Henry Rohn, 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. I'll just say that.

And for him to make the claim, William Hall had to shop his life insurance policy around to several different insurance providers. And the reason is is that it looked like a setup. And he was being set up. William Hall played on Henry's emotions by saying that his wife was cheating on him with the local white man in town. He claims he was doing his friend a favor by letting him know. I just know that the entire characterization of Henry Rohn 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 Rohn heard something that he shouldn't have and there's also rumors that there was a traditional wedding between Molly Burkhardt and Henry Rowne years before she ever met Ernest. 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. They did organize marriages back in those days. It wasn't uncommon. But given the times and what Henry had gone through with Carlisle boarding school in Pennsylvania,

the marriage didn't succeed. And they went their different ways. A traditional marriage could be something that Henry Roan could make a claim for. I don't know. I mean, there's lots of theories about that relationship, some of which we'll never know. One's only left to speculate.

Yeah. You've alluded there 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? My view is that to take William Hale's account of the worth and value of Henry Rones 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 to getting him convicted. Speaks a lot to mainstream society's perception

of the value of Indian people's lives. Yeah, Hale had arranged somehow to be the beneficiary of Henry Rohn's life insurance policy and then Hale had his crony's murder, Henry Rohn. So what I'm hearing from you is everything else that was said about Henry Rohn's drinking and maybe there was an affair and maybe this and maybe that. Yeah, well, maybe, but we can't rely on any of that because that's all a spark screen for the bald fact of the cake.

Exactly, right. But those facts did in the end put Tom White of the Bureau 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 solved by any means, but it was important in putting hail behind bars in the end. Well, you got to understand too that it wasn't until 1924, a year after Henry R. and was murdered, that the United States recognized the indigenous communities in this country as U.S. citizens.

And so it wasn't just bad people. It was bad federal policy with assimilation, allotment, the breakup 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 back-and-call of people who believed in 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 it's not a pretty chapter in American

history, but this 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, but not giving in entirely to all the things that made

a so 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 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 Osage culture as an elemental part, almost literally a character in this film, that retained the dignity of our people and respect for the ancestors who were tragically murdered during that period of time. Yeah, I mean, you must have heard about the book, Killers of the Flower Moon, the bestseller,

and then you hear Martin Scorsese who wants to make it into a film. How did that feel when you heard that was happening? 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 book seller 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 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 O.S.H. people had legitimate concerns, Hollywood as an industry. It doesn't have a 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. concerns about. Oseges who were descendants of the people who were murdered, like myself, got together and wrote to Scorsese and said, we would like to meet with you and talk about what your intentions are with this film. How our ancestors 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, we hear with us, and meet with us in our community. And to Scorsese's credit, he did come. And he brought his whole team with him,

just not just himself, but all the people that has worked on his films going back decades. What did you say to him? Well, I was obviously star struck just like everyone else. I mean, he's only eight feet away from me and I'm talking to a group of 150 Osages 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 their elements of the story that are in this book that are historically accurate. But the Osage 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 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 them you have an opportunity to do something that Hollywood hasn't done before or your industry hasn't done before. Other famous movies at the past like dances with wolves, little big man and last the mohicans were all written by non-Indians, in 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 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. Do you think he succeeded? 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 Osage as 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 Osage spoke during that period of time, what made them laugh, you know. That collaboration allowed the presence of the Osage 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. No. And I think he succeeded in that.

This movie, is it going to change the world? I doubt it. But it's going to hopefully start a conversation about how we got here. After the break, I'll be talking to Jim Roan Gray about the Osage community today, the impact of the reign of terror and the lessons we should all learn from what happened.

We're back. I'm speaking to Jim Rohngray. So you became the, I think, the youngest principal chief of the Osage Nation in 2002, served until 2010. What did that role entail and why did you want it? Well, the 1906 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 2,229 shares

to those Osages on the rolls, they closed the rolls by federal law. They closed them. So in the eyes of the federal law, the only osages they recognized were those original allotees. And injustice had occurred where one fourth of osages were considered Members of the tribe while three fourths of the Osages Were not simply because they did not have an interest in the Osage mineral state Which was something that their parents had and so fast forward to 2002 I'm running for chief and We only have nine original lotis still alive An open question was raised as to what would happen to the O.S.

H nations relationship with the United States. If the last original ought to pass us away. Yeah. Because that part of the O.S. A lot of men act had never been amended over those last 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. And in that election, nine out of the 10 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 all these osages who have been left off the roles for generations to suddenly come back on. And not just governed under a structure that was imposed on him in 1906, 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 that prioritizes language and land and cultural preservation. It's the Constitution that O. Sages 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

is a tribe that was more bent on unity than it was on divisiveness. That was more interested in cultural 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 1920s. What do you think Henry Rohn would have made of all this if he could see it? 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 try to imagine being boarded on a railroad car,

taking a 1,000 miles away from his home and 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 a lot of lives. And I'm not just talking about my great-grandfather. I'm talking about generations of Indian people across the United States, not just osages. I just feel like his system failed him in many, many ways. And the fact that his great grandson went on to become a chief is one I hope that he would

take some pride in, that I 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. When you look around you at the Osage community today, can you still trace the claims, the burden approved fell on the Osage. To prove there was mismanagement. We were able to systematically prove that they consistently over decades failed to get the highest yield of oil. What money they did collected, 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 1906 Act to the time I was chief in the 2000s, we were talking about 100 years, right? The United States finally agreed to settle somewhere close to $400 million. 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 get their hands on Osage headright shares. I think 25% of the Osage headwrites are now in non-Osage hands today. So when we achieve this historic settlement, imagine how it hit Osage is knowing that one fourth of that settlement went to non-Osage entities. That hurt a lot of people, sense of justice, that we're still not there yet.

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 and the political picture, but families are also, of course, having to talk about or not talk about what was done. 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 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. I can

certainly respect any decision any osage 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 horrible crimes back then, we don't live like victims today. Coaching entails 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 Osage Nation? Well, there was a speech 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, 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 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 to stay here. 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 well society learned anything. There's another question that I can't answer.

Yeah. I guess what really struck me the more I found out about what happened in the 1920s 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 capacity to have not known things about history that I should have 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. Well, I think it's a start and maybe you will find others that will share that view and hopefully it could lead to some better outcomes in the future. Let's hope so. Jim Ron Gray, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you for having me, appreciate it. I've been talking to Jim Ron Gray, former principal chief of the Osage Nation. Jim's great-grandfather Henry Rohn 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 a regular schedule with another cautionary tale on Friday, November 10th, all about the importance of archives and the disastrous consequences of failing to preserve them. Corsan retails is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Feins with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow,

Melanie Guthridge, Stella Hartford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohn, Lytel Moulade, John Schnarrs, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Corsary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardaw 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 show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple podcasts or at Pushkin.fm-plus.