| It may have seemed like poetic justice—at least for a time—when oil was found beneath the reservation of the Osage Nation, in Oklahoma, early in the twentieth century. A generation earlier, white Americans had forced the Osage from their lands in Kansas, exiling the tribe to a stretch of territory that was, in the words of the New Yorker staff writer David Grann, “presumably worthless.” The discovery of oil reversed their fortunes. The Osage were now, per capita, the richest people in the world. Newspapers gaped at their mansions and chauffeured cars; one publication remarked that the Osage windfall made bankers “green with envy.” For many members of the tribe, however, their good luck would soon run dry. By 1923, more than two dozen had been murdered, under circumstances that sparked one of the first homicide investigations in the history of the F.B.I. In 2017, The New Yorker published “The Marked Woman,” the opening chapter of Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” A nonfiction account of the case, the book quickly became a best-seller; this past week, a movie adaptation, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro, opened in theatres. Grann’s cinematic storytelling makes the narrative a natural fit for the big screen. Consider, for example, his vivid description of one of the story’s central figures, an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart, waiting for the arrival of her sister, whose disappearance set the case in motion: “Anna had not shown up on Mollie’s front stoop as she usually did, with her long black hair slightly frayed and her dark eyes shining like glass. When Anna came inside, she liked to slip off her shoes, and Mollie missed the comforting sound of her moving, unhurried, through the house. Instead, there was a silence as still as the plains.” | 
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