By Jimmy Lee Beason II, Osage Nation
Native people have been getting much deserved recognition and more accurate portrayals in film and television recently which is a much deserved victory in the battle against Native invisibility. This year we have seen the third and final season of Reservation Dogs on Hulu which, since it premiered in 2021, has brought much needed attention to Native voices in contemporary society.
Rez Dogs follows four Indigenous teenagers as they navigate harsh realities on their Oklahoma reservation through humor and drama. The success of the show, directed by Sterlin Harjo (Muscogee Creek) demonstrated Native stories are and continue to be well received by broader audiences. Although this year marks the end of Reservation Dogs, the impact it has had on the Native community in general is long lasting.
We finally got to see Native people in a modern day scenario dealing with modern day problems, as opposed to the usual 19th century representation of wild “Injuns” roaming the great plains fighting John Wayne.
Another show breaking barriers is Dark Winds which premiered it’s second season on AMC plus back in July. Dark Winds follows Navajo character Jim Chee, a tribal cop portrayed by Kiowa Gordon (Hualapai). He teams up with Joe Leaphorn played by Zahn McClarnon (Hunkpapa Lakota), investigating crimes on the Navajo reservation which takes the viewer into the world of Navajo culture, language and perspectives within a more modern context. Even though the show takes place in 1971, that is a huge achievement considering public school curriculum across the country rarely explores Native communities past the year 1900.
Prey is another successful film with an all Indigenous cast. The Hulu production is a prequel to the Predator series which follows the story of Naru, a young Comanche female warrior who ultimately faces off with the notorious alien hunter. Naru is depicted by Amber Midthunder (Assiniboine-Sioux).
The film was met with high praise as many fans very much appreciated the historical setting among Native people living on the northern plains in the 18th century, and seemed to correct the sloppiness of the more recent iterations of the Predator franchise. Although it does depict Native people in the past, it absolves itself of this typical Hollywood trope by humanizing the Native characters as they square off with an action-horror icon, not to mention there is a Comanche language version of the film.
The most recent win for Native visibility comes through the film, Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorcese. The film is based on actual events that took place on the Osage reservation during the 1920’s. After oil was found on Osage lands, the Osage became extremely wealthy by acquiring royalty checks, called headrights, from companies siphoning oil from their lands. However, this new found wealth brought problems. Soon, white men and women flocked to the Osage reservation hoping to get their hands on that money too by marrying Osages. How did they acquire the money? They would kill their Osage spouses then inherit the headrights.
This happened all over the Osage reservation, but the more egregious killings happened in Fairfax, Oklahoma and those are the ones that get depicted in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro. This little known chapter in Osage history has now been told to millions of people, something I never thought I would see as an Osage man.
Aside from DiCaprio and DeNiro, the breakthrough performance of Lily Gladstone shows how Native people are more than capable of holding their own among seasoned Hollywood actors. Gladstone plays real life Mollie Burkhart, who portrays DiCaprio’s wife in the film.
Gladstone has recently become the first Indigenous nominee for a Golden Globe in Best Performance by an Actress. Gladstone is of the Blackfeet and Nez Perce Nation on her fathers side and she was raised on the Blackfeet reservation living in a log cabin with a wood stove until she was 11 years old.
All of this mainstream representation is a much needed shift in our narrative as Native people. For too long we have been the marginalized of the marginalized. Our population is around 2.5 percent of the overall U.S. population.
According to the 2022 UCLA film diversity report, lead actors in streaming films were 66.7 percent White and 33.3 non-White. Even within non-white representation, Natives were virtually non-existent. Theatrical film leads were 78.4% for Whites, 8% for African-Americans, Asians and Latinos at 2.3%. Native film representation was 0 percent. This is a shame considering Native people are the original stewards of these lands.
However, with the current trend of Native actors, directors and filmmakers breaking through barriers, we may see a day when Native people are finally in charge of our stories and our visibility can only increase.
