For weddings a century in the past, Swan mentioned, “they might give away 50 or 60 heads of horse, feed 400 or 500 folks for every week.” In a single account from 1932, in Hominy, Okla., the daddy of the bride purchased 5 new Chevrolet roadsters and gave them away, Swan added. “He mentioned he spent some $50,000 on that marriage ceremony” — over $1 million in at this time’s {dollars}.
That degree of festivity was typically reserved for the eldest sons or daughters of a household, through the period of organized marriages, and was restricted primarily to full-blooded Osage, like Mollie Kyle. (It might have been unlikely for an Osage lady marrying a white man, as she does within the film, Swan identified — however that was Scorsese’s artistic license.)
The scene is a second of lightness in a narrative that’s in any other case wrenching. In his e book, Grann writes that there have been most likely far, way more deaths than the 24 that the F.B.I. arrived to resolve.
O’Keefe grew up in Pawhuska, Okla., the capital of Osage lands. “All people has a connection to the story,” she mentioned. “There isn’t a district that doesn’t, as a result of everyone inside our communities misplaced somebody, our members of the family, attributable to unusual circumstances.”
The marriage coats are one emblem from that point that has been rewoven repeatedly; after World Warfare II, they have been worn on the Osage’s conventional summer season neighborhood dance, as a substitute of at weddings. It’s a uncommon and vivid instance of a historic garment that attains cultural longevity, Swan mentioned, whereas additionally being “recharted.”
At a latest dance, there have been six or eight “bridesmaids,” O’Keefe mentioned, “wearing all these completely different marriage ceremony coats and hats, that have been all given away to households.”
Every lady solely will get one outing with a coat. In a dance that has hardly modified for greater than a century, it’s a deeply symbolic second, Shaw Obligation famous. “Individuals will at all times keep in mind who wore them, who made them,” she mentioned. “It’s all our personal little Osage world, occurring right here, and it fills us with happiness.”
