Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon opens with a holy man’s prayer before a burial. Curiously, this rite doesn’t feature a human body. It’s a pipe. “Tomorrow we will bury this one,” he says, as if speaking about a departed friend. “It is time to bury this pipe with dignity, and put away its teachings.” It’s a totem imbued with life, carrying with it the whole history of the Osage people, as the children—seen peering into the dome hut—“will learn new ways” under the dominion of the whites who will take charge of a new generation’s language, education and religion. A procession carries the pipe outside, and it is reverently buried beneath the weeping prairie.
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