Elise Paschen’s poem “Wi’-gi-e” or “Prayer” from her 2009 book BESTIARY honors Anna Kyle Brown, who was thought to be the first victim of the Osage Reign of Terror.
For Shannon Toll, Associate Professor of Indigenous Literatures at the University of Dayton, Paschen’s poem serves as “an act of remembrance and a call to action: It is up to the speaker – and perhaps the reader – to explore, rather than ignore, spaces of loss and injustice. It is also a testament to the fact that the stories of the Osage people neither begin nor end with the events that will be portrayed in Scorsese’s film; as one Osage citizen declared, “We were victims of these crimes. We don’t live as victims.”