Junior Taylor Hight (pictured below right with actor Lily Gladstone) got a chance not many do – to be in a major Hollywood movie with an Oscar-winning director.

The film was Killers of the Flower Moon, a fictionalized story based on a 2017 nonfiction book of the same title by David Grann. Martin Scorsese directed.

The movie focuses on a white businessman, William Hale, played by Robert de Niro, who claimed to be “a true friend” to the Osage Nation, while orchestrating murders of Osage people in order to get their lucrative oil rights.

Leonardo di Caprio also stars, as Ernest Burkhart, who marries an Osage woman (played by Lily Gladstone) and becomes complicit in Hale’s schemes.

Hight, who is from Skiatook, Okla., has Osage, Shawnee and Delaware heritage.

She and her mother, Christie Duty, her brother, Brandon Hight, and “my whole family – aunts, uncles, cousins,” were extras in the movie. When the casting directors came around, Hight’s relatives “knew who to talk to,” she said. “[The people making the movie] were trying to get as many Osage people as they could to be in it.”

Killers of the Flower Moon was shot on location in Fairfax and Pawhuska, Okla., during the summer of 2021.

“We would mostly be walking back and forth in the background” of a scene, Hight said. “You act like you’re talking to each other.

“We had to do costume fittings and then had assigned costumes. Every morning of filming, I went to hair and makeup. I filmed for probably a week, about five days.”

Hight said her favorite day was a very long one, nearly 24 hours starting early on one morning and finishing early on the next.

“It was the day of the explosion scene, when the house [blows up]. There was fire everywhere. We were supposed to be running in the background, acting concerned about the people in the house.

“That was the day I got near Leonardo di Caprio. I talked to his mom and his makeup person that day, too.”

Extras were guaranteed $100 a day (10 hours of filming), plus overtime. For Hight, it was “not so much the money as a cool experience, being part of a big event about my people’s history. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

There was a premiere in Tulsa this past July, exclusively for Osage people. Scorsese and nearly all of the stars were there, Hight said.

She had her picture taken with Lily Gladstone, Tantoo Cardinal, Jesse Plemons, Tatanka Means and William Belleau.

The film has generated some controversy among the Osage, who object that it tells the story from the white man’s (Burkhart) point of view rather than the Osage one.

“I understand that feeling,” Hight said, but for herself, “I liked it a lot. I liked that our [Osage] story is being told.”

Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel ranks at #23 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of “Best Regional Colleges Midwest” for 2023-24. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see https://www.bethelks.edu