By Toby McIntosh

Zitkala-Ša’s Connection to the Latest Scorsese Movie

By Toby McIntosh

The new Martin Scorsese movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, highlights the investigations into the 60-plus murders during the “Osage Reign of Terror.” In 1923, while the violence was underway, former Lyon Park resident Zitkala-Ša traveled to Oklahoma to document the systemic exploitation of members of the Osage tribe.

Zitkala-Ša interviewed victims while two colleagues combed public records about the corrupt legal system created after the Osage became wealthy from oil found on tribal lands. “Guardians” were appointed for persons declared “incompetent,” mostly girls and women, thus controlling their assets and profiting from them. The guardians’ greed was described in the report: “Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes–Legalized Robbery.” 

Particularly powerful are Zitkala-Ša’s empathetic descriptions of the treatment of Indigenous girls and women. Zitkala-Ša’s earlier writings had recounted her own traumatic experiences in boarding school. In Oklahoma, she gathered testimony, writing at one point:

“After a long private conference with this little girl, I grew dumb at the horrible things…. There was nothing I could say. Mutely I put my arms around her, whose great wealth made her a victim of an unscrupulous, lawless party, and whose little body was mutilated by a drunken fiend who assaulted her night after night.”

Of another situation, she wrote, “I felt an overwhelming indignation at the legal helplessness of a poor rich Indian woman.”

Investigating the conditions of Indigenous people was core to Zitkala-Ša’s life mission. In the summer of 1926, she and her husband took a 10,600-mile automobile trip to Oklahoma and South Dakota to promote their new advocacy group and investigate reservation conditions. Their findings were often stark. Before a Senate committee, Zitkala-Ša reported: “After these many years of control and management of the Indians and their property what do we find today? Many Indians landless, homeless, poor, raged, tubercular, sore-eyed, and their leadership broken.”

Zitkala-Ša, a Yankton Sioux, lived in Lyon Park from 1926 until her death in 1938. Arlington County renamed the park at N. Highland and 7th Streets in her honor in 2020. In 2024, a Zitkala-Ša quarter will
be issued.