Crucial to this history, but missing from the film, is that this dangerous atmosphere was not primarily a product of Hale or the other corrupt people who came to the Osage Reservation after the discovery of oil. Rather, it arose in the context of the grinding reality of federal Indian policy, which, from the 1880s through the 1940s, proliferated avenues through which Native peoples would lose their land and resources more and more easily. Importantly, this is central to the story of the Osage murders not because it sets the stage for what happened, but because it was, in fact, a primary cause of what unfolded.
That is, what Hale and others took advantage of was not negligence on the part of the U.S. government, nor was the guardian system that put Osages at risk unique to them. In setting itself up as the trustee over allotted Native lands, the U.S. government operationalized an assumption that was a consistent aspect of policy since the 1830s, which is that Native Americans are not competent, either individually or collectively as tribal peoples, to make their own decisions. In the words of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1832, the relationship of Native Americans to the U.S. was “that of a ward to his guardian.” The use of these same terms 90 years later on the Osage Reservation is not a coincidence, and neither the federal government nor the lawyers and others who served as guardians to Osages saw themselves as primarily protecting the interests of their supposedly incompetent wards.
Allotment — the subdividing of Native lands among individuals — was the realization of an aspiration going back to the 1830s: expropriating Native lands in a way that would pass muster with courts and allow those who ended up on those lands to proclaim and perceive the process as fair and square. The outcome of allotment demonstrates how powerfully the policy worked. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Indigenous landholdings in the U.S. declined from 150 million to 50 million acres. Those 150 million acres were just 8% of the 1.9 billion acres of land in the contiguous United States, so after 50 years of allotment, Native Americans controlled less than 3% of the continent that was effectively all theirs prior to colonization. Allotting Native lands not only made this expropriation possible; in important ways, it mandated it. Not surprisingly, headrights operated in their own way as allotments insofar as they were not really a form of communal ownership, but a dividing-up of a resource into shares among a corporate body, shares that could pass from Osages to whites.