So, as some of a line from my poem Wi'-gi-e, which means
prayer in Osage, was used as the title for David Grann's book
and Martin Scorsese's movie, Killers Of The Flower Moon.
The line in the poem reads, "during Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the,
the Killer of the Flowers Moon."
After attending the Osage Nation premiere of the film,
I had the chance to spend time with Lily Gladstone.
Lilly portrays Mollie Burkhart, whose family
was murdered during the Reign of Terror, 1921 through 1926,
a tragic period of American history
when outsiders killed the Osage for their oil headrights.
My own Tallchief family lived in the small town of Fairfax
at this time.
What's so funny?
[LAUGHING]
[CLEARS THROAT]
After Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone confides,
she wore my great grandmother Eliza's blankets
in three scenes.
I don't remember my great grandmother, though,
in a photo, aged 90, she holds me in her arms.
The actress plays Mollie Burkhart,
who lived down the street from Eliza in Fairfax.
Hands out wide, Lily says, "Eliza had a broad wingspan.
She pleated the wool broadcloth several times.
Through an open window, wings outstretched.
An eagle owl looms toward Mollie's mother,
dying from poison.
My mother told me that owls and trees wailed the windswept night
before her father died.
Wrapping my great grandmother's striped blanket
around her shoulders, Mollie asks her husband
during a downpour not to close the window.
Be still, she says, and listen to the rain.
Eliza's blankets fold and unfold stories
into every pattern I fly back home.
The Osage replaced hide robes with Dutch traded blankets
in the mid 19th century.
I stop breathing during the night of film
when a murderer calls Osage women blankets.
While her husband injects Mollie with arsenic,
each sister is shot, poisoned, or bombed to death.
A woman in a voiceover foreshadows this blanket
is a target on our backs.
In the quiet after Mollie's obituary is reported,
I only hear rain.
Outside the theater, silent thunderbirds
overhead spread dark, cloud spattered wings.
Outlining circles across a broad cloth.
Inside each target a hole in the sky.
[APPLAUSE]