For a Native viewer, one moment in Killers of the Flower Moon stands out above the rest

polygon.com:

There’s a small moment in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon that fundamentally changed the way I viewed the entire story. The film, now streaming on Apple TV Plus, is a straightforward recounting of a painful time in Native American history — the infuriating true story of the 1920s Osage murders. But this one scene goes past simple history, and makes the movie something essential.

Full disclosure: I’m a Native American of the Ponca Tribe, and I had family members who worked on Killers of the Flower Moon as extras. We’ve long shared land, customs, and family with the Osage, largely due to our reservations being next to each other when both tribes were forced into Oklahoma. Our lands were so close that many Poncas found oil on their allotments as well, and that closeness meant a lot of intertribal marriages and relationships. My family actually still has some Osage headrights, but they’re so diluted, they bring in about $80 a year.

Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true tale of the Osage murders in Oklahoma in the early 1900s. On top of having to fight back against the systemic racism keeping them from their own money, the Osage had to contend with a judicial system that largely didn’t care if they were killed. One character in the movie, John Ramsey (Ty Mitchell), even mentions that he considers killing Indians different from killing “people.” Another character accurately notes that at the time, it’d be easier to convict someone of killing a dog than killing an Indian. In the eyes of powerful white society, Natives were subhuman — obstacles to be disposed of in the hunt for profit and power.

It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact number of Osage victims in the Oklahoma killings, but the most recent estimation from current Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear is roughly 150. Rather than trying to highlight each victim, Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth, working from David Grann’s bestselling nonfiction book, filter the tragedy through Mollie