Yancey Red Corn, actor and a member of the Osage, Caddo and Potawatomi Tribes in the United States, spoke with National Indigenous Times about Martin Scorcese's Killers of the Flower Moon and the legacy and struggle faced by his Tribes from the time when non-native Americans first arrived on Tribal land through to today.

Red Corn plays Chief Arthur Bonnicastle in the film, which examines the Osage Tribe's journey during the oil boom of the 1920s, a time during which at least two dozen Osage were killed, including Red Corn's own great-great-grandfather. Some believes the actual number of those assassinated, often by poison, was in the hundreds.

"Colonialism is all over the world. And the damage that it's done, and the trauma," Red Corn said.

"It was the biggest oil and gas deposit back then in the world. A lot of them got rich off the Osage, it's when they came in and started drilling. And then they wound up and became, you know, really, really wealthy. And the Osage has just gotten royalties out of it. And then in the 1920s, it was really booming… just an incredible amount of money in the 1920s."

The amassing of this wealth, combined with the rise of oil dependence in the United States, saw the Osage Tribal lands swamped with non-native American businesspeople seeking to exploit the situation.

Many Native Americans were forced by law to hand over their royalties to 'guardians' or were exploited by business people seeking to profit from people they considered 'inferior' as a race.

As revealed in the movie, there comes a dark turn when these non-native Americans believe they're not getting enough of the wealth, and resent having to pay royalties to the Osage.

"In the 1920s, they would kill us. But nobody would investigate it because they didn't consider us human beings. They consider us like animals," Red Corn told National Indigenous Times.

"And they're (the Osage) trying to just live and ignore it, just try to get through it. Because just know you can't trust, you can't trust your neighbour, you can't trust the local pastor or the priest, you couldn't trust the local police, you couldn't trust the federal government, you couldn't trust the state government, you couldn't trust anybody, the morgues, and morticians, the doctors because they were the ones helping to poison (us)," he said.

"All they had was themselves and trying to get through this Reign of Terror as they call it."

The film not only unveils a historical tale but also reflects on the contemporary challenges faced by Indigenous communities who live on land full of resources coveted by non-Indigenous people, an experience not confined to the United States alone.

"I think the Tribes here is so similar to the story of Aboriginal people background where it is not just a singular event of the arrival of visitors and colonisers right, but the consistent repetition of, of traumatic and violent events," Red Corn said.

Unlike Australia, the United States has had treaties with First Nations people since 1778. The first treaty was not only a friendship agreement but also a mutual military pact between the newly-formed United States and the Lenape people, commonly known as the Delaware Tribe. However, the terms and conditions of treaties were often ignored by non-native people, companies and authorities.

"In the late '60s, for my dad's generation, they started becoming educated. And then we had these native attorneys start and started reading the treaties from a constitutional viewpoint. And from you know, the law, and they're like, these treaties are still alive."

In more recent decades, treaties have been used as a way to ensure the economic and land security for Tribes.

"And this is what we can start doing… that's why they push through the Indian self-determination Act where tribes were able to determine their own memberships, their own government and kind of started moving that way. And that's a big deal. And again, even though we're able to move… we're still under the federal government. You know, we're just a dependent sovereign government."

Tribal Nations are considered the Third Sovereign in the United States, alongside the federal and state governments.

Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas now. The best-selling book on which the movie is based, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, is available in bookstores. A Pipe for February: A Novel, written by Yancey Red Corn's father and is a fictionalised tale about the Reign of Terror is available on Amazon.