My Read and Reflect on the Oscar-Nominated Book Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The Oscars took place this weekend, and I don't know if anyone else appreciated having Conan O'Brian as the host as much as I did. I thought it was a refreshing change of pace (but not as refreshing as having Nikki Glaser host the Golden Globes). Hopefully his performance this weekend proved that.

Anyway, for today's blog post, I thought I would share my thoughts on reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, which is a book that was turned into a movie and nominated for an Oscar in 2024. I had read the book for class last year, and I thought I would pull out the reflection and talk about it today.

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Some Things to Note:

I am going to go ahead and copy and paste what I originally wrote and submitted for class on April 16, 2024. I will put that into quotes and keep that text in this same color.

For the purposes of this blog post, I am going to change the color of the font into this brown color and put into bold the text for any changes that I make/add to the text. These changes might be commentary to what I had written (which I might just put into parenthesis like this), additional information that I want to include now didn't originally add, or might just be structural changes I want to make for the purposes of this blog post. And of course, I'm adding in all the images and graphics this time too.

After all, I do believe in revision and growing alongside our writing, and it had been a year since I wrote this. So let's dig into my read and reflect work for Killers of the Flower Moon.

Read and Reflect on Killers of the Flower Moon from April 16, 2024

"Since I had already bought the book before we were given options, I chose to read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (After I had already purchased books for the semester, Jocelyn gave us the option to read several different books this particular week of class). Even though I didn’t start the book with a vision of how I would go about writing, teaching, or thinking about craft, what I can say is that, as I read, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Natasha Tretheway’s Memorial Drive. In Killers of the Flower Moon, the injustices that the Osage had to endure consistently reminded me about how the death of Tretheway’s mother might have been avoided if the government hadn’t been negligent. The major differences in the scenarios are the power dynamics at play. In Grann’s book, William Hale is a man who had employed dozens of other men to make sure that he could secure the headrights of the family his nephews had married into, with corruption existing throughout the city and government. In contrast, Joel in Tretheway’s Memorial Drive is able to commit murder because law enforcement did not take Tretheway’s mother seriously; Joel does not have political influence in the way that Hale did, but exhibited power through the fact that he was a male in a time when women weren’t taken seriously, especially women of color. 

Summary (Added this Header)

"To quickly summarize the book, part one of the book details the Osage murders, part two details how Hoover streamlined the creation of the FBI, and part three ties the two of these events together while detailing how underexamined the events taking place in the 1920s were. Mollie Burkhart was losing much of her family as a result of murder, whether it was poisoned alcohol or something as brutal as bullets to the head. At first, they seemed random, because other Osages were also being murdered, but this is where the creation of the FBI comes in. During this time, J. Edgar Hoover oversaw the Bureau of Investigation and tries to push the organization towards being uniform and utilizing (I originally had a spelling error) scientific methods; while trying to build the Bureau’s reputation, Hoover assigns a Texas Ranger named Tom White to the job of uncovering what was happening to the Osages. It is White who uncovers that Mollie’s husband Ernest was being controlled by his uncle, William Hale. 

Quotes and Moments I Noted from Killers of the Flower Moon (I'm adding this whole section in)

• "There lingers memories like a half forgotten dream, of an enchanting world dawning on a child's consciousness in its wonder and mystery" (Grann 49).

• "'It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls,' a U.S. government official had stated, adding, 'Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor? ... It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the children.' (Grann 52)."

• "Yet from the outset the fascination with private detectives was mixed with aversion. They were untrained and unregulated and often had criminal records themselves. Beholden to paying clients, they were widely seen as surreptitious figures who burglarized people's secrets" (Grann 62).

• "When questioned about the excess, Marland was unapologetic. 'To me, the purpose of the money was to buy, and to build. And that's what I've done. And if that's what they mean, then I'm guilty.' Yet in only a few years, he would be so broke that he couldn't afford his lighting bill and had to vacate his mansion" (Grann 84).

• "Because of lingering opposition to a national police force, Roosevelt's attorney general had acted without legislative approval, leading one congressman to label the new organization a 'bureaucratic bastard' (Grann 113)."

• "In December 1924, Stone gave Hoover the job he longed for. Hoover would rapidly reshape the bureau into a monolithic force--one that, during his nearly five-decade reign as director, he would deploy not only to combat crime but also to commit egregious abuses of power" (Grann 116).

• "Despite this expenditure, Hoover had decided, after assuming command of the bureau, to dump the case back on state authorities in order to evade responsibility for the failure" (Grann 119).

• "Though it took enormous courage and virtue to risk your life in order to protect society, such selflessness also contained, at least from the vantage point of your loved ones, a hint of cruelty" (Grann 151).

• "And he came to see the law as a struggle to subdue the violent passions not only in others but also in oneself" (Grann 153).

• "... Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they're scalping our souls out here" (Grann 167).

• The Charles Lindberg baby case is mentioned on page 251 (it is a case I hope to never forget because I did my history project on it in eighth grade).

"Questions for Discussion (I changed the font into a header here):

• In the process of world-building in part one, there are media reports of the wealth and lifestyle of the Osage that reveal how Americans saw the Native Americans. How does this lay the foundation for how the murders and mysterious deaths were handled?

• The Osages are compared and contrasted against other groups of Native Americans as they are being introduced. How did this create a portal into Grann’s world? 

• As readers, we are given manufactured evidence, suborned testimony, and false confessions; how long did it take you, as a reader, to figure out when you should start questioning the information you were being given?"

And that concludes what I submitted when it came to the Read and Reflect of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. I'm sure that I have more notes in a binder somewhere, but I have yet to unpack them, so maybe I'll share them another time.