The Osage Nation
The Richest
People in
the World.
In the 1870s, starvation and smallpox killed 90% of the tribe. Then oil was discovered beneath their land — and by 1919 the Osage Nation held the most valuable mineral rights on the continent, the richest people on earth per capita.
Long Knife is the story of what happened next — and of what is still happening. It is the documentary sequel to Killers of the Flower Moon: same land, same wealth, different criminals.
Sovereignty
Big Oil sucked billions of dollars in petroleum from the reservation and walked away, leaving the Tribe with thousands of abandoned wells leaking chemicals and methane. The Osage are blocked from cleaning the filth on their own land — and from controlling their own property, which is still lorded over by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Chief Standing Bear, a trial lawyer, is not waiting to find out how the story ends. He is filing lawsuits and leading a campaign to take back control of his Nation's land and shut down the earth-destroying methane belching into the atmosphere.
“Now how do you allow a company to just walk away like that?”
— Everett Waller, Chairman, Osage Minerals Council
Osage Voices in the Film
Featured in
Long Knife
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Principal Chief, Osage Nation
Geoffrey Standing Bear
Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, a trial lawyer, and a consulting producer on Long Knife. He is filing lawsuits and leading the campaign to take back control of the Nation's land — and to shut down the abandoned wells still poisoning it.
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Chairman, Osage Minerals Council
Everett Waller
Chairman of the Osage Minerals Council — and, as the film's narrator Robert De Niro puts it, an Osage hunter who tracks down the oil rustlers. He has spent years chasing the theft of his Nation's crude.
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Archivist, Oklahoma Historical Society
Tara Damron
Tara Damron is Osage, and an archivist with the Oklahoma Historical Society. She is the plaintiff in a case at the heart of the Osage sovereignty battle.
The oil was stolen. The land was poisoned.
The story is not over.