The Story in Pawhuska

[Just happened on to this old blog post from four years ago. Killers of the Flower Moon is a stunner. See it. But we spent a long weekend in Pawhuska (on the Osage Reservation) when the excitement over the movie was just beginning. It's just as stunning as I hoped it would be.]

"What places do I absolutely have to see when I'm here?" I asked her. 

"You have to see our church," she told me from behind the desk at the Osage visitor's center. She was clearly herself at least part Osage. I liked the way she had pushed the church at me, as if it was simply not to be missed--"our church," she said. She was speaking as a proud tribal person. 

"Our church," is Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a red-brick cruciform built in 1910 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

When I got there, all doors were locked. A sign on the office door posted a number I called. A woman with a pleasant voice told me it was closed for the holiday weekend, but she'd meet me anyway. That was nice of her, and I told her so. 

By the time we got inside the church, a half-dozen others had joined us on the tour, a family from Colorado on their way to a college football game. Thought they'd stop, they said. So there we stood in the middle of the church ready to begin. 

Our silver-haired docent introduced herself by saying she was linked to the region by blood, by DNA. She was part Osage herself, she said, but born and reared in Dallas because her grandma had left Osage County a couple generations earlier, scared to death of being murdered. 

I knew at least something of what she meant. 

"You know the story?" she asked the folks in football jerseys. 

They shook their heads. She turned to me. I'd met her only five minutes earlier. "You tell them," she said. Not a question, a command. She wasn't kidding. "You tell them," she said.

Blew me away. "Me?" I said. Made no sense. She was the guide. 

She nodded at me, then smiled endearingly, as if to let me know to trust her. 

The truth was, I did know the story--so I told them. 

For the record, this February, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, right there in Osage County on Osage tribal land, will welcome Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DiNiro, Martin Scorsese, and a score of other Hollywood headliners, who will be filming the story told in David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon, the complicated story of a grisly rash of unsolved murders in the early 1920s, multiple deaths of Osage men and women who had suddenly become unimaginably wealthy when oil gushed from wells drilled into their land. In 1925, Pawhuska, Oklahoma had a Rolls Royce dealership, but it also had dozens of dead Indians. The story she wanted me the Colorado visitors who didn't know is horrifying.

When I finished, she told me with yet another smile that she thought I'd done well. 

Immaculate Conception's claim to fame is a colorful stained glass rendition of a Dutch-born priest named Father John Shoenmakers as he brings the divine light of Christ to the Osage, who were, back then, in southern Kansas. The story she loved to tell herself was that the Osage needed the special approval of Rome for that particular window because it featured Native men and women who were still alive and were therefore, by some papal edict, not supposed to be so gloriously honored in stained glass. The Osage won that fight; so today, if you visit, someone will point at the north window with great pride.

The Colorado bunch had to get to the ball game, they said, so they left, thanking her for the tour; but she had more to show me, she said, and I was more than anxious to listen. We went up in the balcony where she showed me the window celebrating the Immaculate Conception itself. 

And then she showed me this.

A dedication at the bottom of one of those gorgeous German-made wonders indicated this particular window honored the memory of a woman named Sybil Bolton. "She was one of them," she told me. What she meant, I knew, was that Sybil Bolton was one of the murdered Osage women.

Then we walked out back to the new chapel built to honor Tekakwitha, a Mohawk, the very first and only Native American saint.

My tour guide was gracious and animated. Clearly, she loved her church--and her people.

Sybil Bolton, I read later, was a young Osage woman who learned to play the harp at an exclusive East Coast boarding school. Then back home, at the age of just 21 years old she died mysteriously with her baby at her side and was buried here in an ermine coat. 

The silver-haired docent had said very little of that, only "She was among those who died." 

The undying horror of the Osage "reign of terror," is that the community still lives with it. The great-grandchildren of killers attend school with the great-grandchildren of victims. In the 20s, when the FBI began to work the case, they were foiled in every way by white and red alike. Fear and shame kept mouths shut. 

That's at least part of the story Martin Scorsese will soon be telling. That's the story she asked me to tell.

Immaculate Conception is still there, welcoming guests like myself. "Our church," the woman at the visitors desk had explained. "You have to see our church."

Pawhaska is a touristy place today, home of Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman. You can shop at all kinds of specialty stores in the old downtown and buy all kinds of nice things you didn't think you needed. But like the woman in the visitor's center said, don't miss Immaculate Conception Church. That guide I had was terrific, gave a wonderful tour.  

But she seemed to appreciate it if I handled the bad stuff. I can't help but think the burden is still, a century later, almost too heavy to carry. For her, the whole tour was less of a load if I was the one who told the story.

The novelist William Faulkner lived a half a continent away, but in Pawhuska at least, "the past isn't dead," he memorably said. "It isn't even the past."