Killers of the Flower Moon
by David Grann
The richest people in America were being murdered. Nobody stopped it.
For you if
you want to understand how the United States systematically transferred Indigenous wealth to white settlers and called it progress
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$17 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
The Osage murders reconstructed from FBI files, family testimony, and decades of buried history. In the 1920s the Osage Nation was the wealthiest people per capita in the world — oil under their Oklahoma land. Then they started dying. Grann spent years in the archives and with the Osage community and what he found was a conspiracy so extensive it implicated an entire county and led to the founding of the modern FBI. The most important American true crime book ever written, because the crime is not just murder — it is what America does to Native wealth.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- An outside perspective on North America
- Topics
- osage murders
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Killers of the Flower Moon(2023)
dir. Martin Scorsese
Murder for money, disguised as marriage.
In 1920s Oklahoma, oil wealth makes the Osage Nation targets of a systematic campaign of murder, exploitation, and legalized theft, carried out in part by white men who married into Osage families. Adapted from David Grann's book of the same name.
Why it’s here: Punk in centering Mollie Burkhart's interiority instead of turning her murder into a backdrop for a white antihero's guilt. Pedagogical in showing how legalized guardianship and "headrights" turned bureaucracy itself into a weapon against the Osage.
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Independence from Britain. Empire over everyone else.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Mean Spirit
Linda Hogan
Oil under Osage land. White men with plans.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown
Westward expansion, told by the people it destroyed.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST