henry roan went out for a drive. a few days later, his car was found on the side of a road. inside, henry lay dead, slumped over the steering wheel. he was shot from the back of the head. jim gray and his son are henry roan s descendants. my mom named me james brown gray, and when i had my own son, i named him henry roan horse gray. my family never tried to sugar coat the story. it was very upfront, you were named after a man who was murdered. we both carried that same burden to know who we descended from, know what kind of challenges that he paid the ultimate price for. why was henry roan killed, and why is it still so raw for
all-out war on native culture. we need to stop them from being indian. we need to christianize them. we need to reeducate their children, and this is what they did. henry roan and tens of thousands of native children were forced to leave their families to attend boarding school. they didn t just, you know, okay, we re going to pick up your kids and we re going to take them to this school down the street. no, they took them five states away. shaved their hair, washed their mouths out with soap when they ever spoke their language or tried to practice their traditional ways. kill the indian, save the . that was the policy of the day.
and then to know that it happened in your own family mm-hmm. how does that make you feel? well, there s a discriminatory kind of culture that i ve been sensitive to all my life even though i don t look particularly indian and i can pass certainly as a white man from time to time. but these murders made me very sensitive to these issues, and so one of the things that you live with is that some of your neighbors are now descendants of perpetrators, which really makes it hard. sybil bolton, joe bates, henry roan, mollie burkhart s sisters and mother. so many people lost their lives during the reign of terror. their families left traumatized by fear and grief.
but she had no proof. molly s family starts dying. molly s families family starts disappearing, and there s no good answers. molly went to the authorities, but they dismissed her claims. two years later, her ex-husband, henry roan, was also found shot and killed. and then molly s third sister, rita, and her husband died after a homemade nitroglycerine bomb was planted in their home. it exploded, and obviously you can see the wreckage. so just in complete ruins. she tells me about all the people molly lost. anna, lizzie q, rita, henry roan. so this is the family that was targeted.
you the whole time. that s a level of evil that it s hard to get your arms wrapped around it. the trial took place here in the pahuska courthouse. climbing these steps, i can t help but wonder what it must have been like to be molly burkhardt, to watch your own husband take the stand for helping murder your family. in the end, ernest confessed and was sentenced to life in prison for the killing of molly s sister and her husband. hale also got life for ordering the death of henry roan. the cases were seen by all white juries, and their convictions were seen as victories by the fbi and the osage people. but then people kept dying mysteriously, and there has never been justice for anyone else since these trials.