Recently, a young woman approached comedian, filmmaker and television writer Joey Clift at a gathering of Indigenous people working in Hollywood. She introduced herself as a fellow member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and told him that seeing his success in the industry inspired her to start taking writing classes.
Clift, whose films and writing work have appeared on Cartoon Network and Comedy Central, is also part of an all-Native writing team on Netflix’s animated “Spirit Rangers,” which features Native American kids who use magic to solve problems in a fictional national park .
But growing up on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, he didn’t see people who looked like him on screen or know anyone working behind the scenes in films or TV. Now, when he thinks about inspiring the next generation, he says, “It’s tough to describe how cool that is.”
Mountlake Terrace High School graduate Lily Gladstone (of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage) appears poised to become the first Native American to win the best actress Oscar at Sunday’s 96th Academy Award ceremony, for her work in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” But Gladstone is only the most visible tip of a wave of Indigenous people gaining visibility and giving others a voice in the entertainment world.
The flowering of Indigenous representation in the media in recent years is partly because of the opportunities presented by new platforms such as streaming and the internet.
“The stage itself has expanded,” said Adam Piron, a Kiowa and Mohawk filmmaker and the director of the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program. “There was finally kind of enough room for more people to get in.” He said many Indigenous filmmakers travel the traditional routes of introducing work to audiences, such as film festivals (including the Sundance Film Festival, which has included Native American films since the 1990s).
But the lines between theatrical film and other formats have been blurred. The 2023 film “Fancy Dance,” which stars Gladstone and premiered at Sundance, will stream on Apple+.
When “Prey,” an action film with a young Comanche woman as its protagonist, premiered in 2022, the streaming service Hulu said it was its most-watched movie or TV series premiere ever.
Network and streaming series with Native actors, crew members and stories, including FX’s “Reservation Dogs” and AMC’s “Dark Winds,” have gained both success and critical acclaim.
The Disney+ series “Echo,” whose central character is a member of the Choctaw Nation and whose cast and crew are a mix of Native and non-Native talent, was the No. 1 series on Disney+ when it debuted earlier this year.
Other series featuring Indigenous talent include Syfy’s “Resident Alien” and Peacock’s “Rutherford Falls,” as well as Netflix’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” which debuted Feb. 22 and was Netflix’s top TV show that week.
The bar for entry on platforms such as YouTube, websites and TikTok is even lower. Sketch comedy group The 1491s gained attention via YouTube videos starting in 2009. Alumni from the group went on to make “Reservation Dogs” and the play “Between Two Knees,” which hit the Seattle Rep stage last year.
Audiences can go online to watch Clift’s animated series, “Gone Native,” which he describes on the gonenative.tv website as “comedy shorts about weird stuff Native Americans & Indigenous people deal with way too often.”
“There’s been a really steady hum of talent that’s been developing on these alternative platforms like YouTube for some time,” said Jessica McEver, a member of the Cherokee Nation and director of pop culture and media at IllumiNative, a national organization that works to increase representation and opportunities for Native American talent.
Nurturing talent
The recent surge of Indigenous entertainment is also based on decades of work Indigenous people have done to nurture their own and others’ talents, often behind the scenes.
“Native folks who were making films in the ’90s are only now getting support they should have had back then,” said Raven Two Feathers (Cherokee, Seneca, Cayuga, Comanche), a documentary filmmaker and artist based in SeaTac.
A growing number of organizations and initiatives help local Indigenous people wanting to get into the field. Many Native creators have come up through Sundance labs, whose alumni include “Fancy Dance” creators Erica Tremblay (Seneca-Cayuga) and Bremerton’s Miciana Alise (Tlingit).
Seattle-based Native theater program Red Eagle Soaring has for 30 years been introducing Native kids to acting and to Native talent, including Gladstone, who directed summer shows there in 2014 and 2015. “To the rest of the world, she’s an overnight sensation, but she’s been doing the work for years,” said Iñupiat actor and singer Nicole Suyama, interim artistic director.
Tracy Rector, a longtime filmmaker and Indigenous advocate, has shepherded many Indigenous filmmakers through organizations including SIFF Cinema and Longhouse Media.
These groups jointly support Indigenous filmmakers, who then support one another. Two Feathers says this collaborative way of working embodies the idea, long held in many Indigenous communities, that wealth is not just how much you have but how much you share. “It provides a great framework, and not just for Indigenous people,” he said.
A different flavor of story
Stories Native people tell about themselves often have a much different flavor from the stories others have long told about them. While non-Native content creators have often portrayed Native people as everything from violent enemies to downtrodden relics of the past, Indigenous creators tend to tell contemporary stories filled with humor and complex interpersonal dynamics. The backdrop of oppression is still there, but it’s often just that — a backdrop.
“It’s this weird stereotype that Native people exist as stoic medicine people who look into the distance and say prophetic stuff while solemn music plays,” Clift said. In reality, “you’d be hard-pressed to hang out with a group of Native people and not hear them cracking jokes all the time.”
Because many non-Native people get much of their exposure to Native communities through the media, film and TV can shine more light on issues important to Indigenous people. HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country” recently explored the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People movement.
Indigenous people want to see their communities depicted in all their complexity. “We don’t want to be the token anymore,” Suyama said. Why not, she wonders, a Native American leading lady in a romantic comedy?
“The ability to zoom in and out on a huge scale is what draws me to play around in the art form of film,” Two Feathers said. But it’s also a way of telling stories, as Indigenous people have for generations — “almost like you’re sitting around a campfire.”
Audiences crave these stories, too. The 2018 Reclaiming Native Truth research project found that 78% of Americans surveyed agreed that “it is important to feature more stories about Native Americans on TV, in films and in other entertainment.”
A way to go
As far as Indigenous creators have come in the media, there is still a long way to go.
The 2023 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report showed that in 2022, Native American actors had only 0.4% of theatrical film roles, and none of the top 200 theatrical releases included Native American women actors — something Gladstone changed last year. Native American representation in streaming films was higher, with 0.7%, but still didn’t match the overall share of people with Indigenous ancestry in the US, about 2.9%.
Some Indigenous people are left out more than others. Two Feathers is working on a documentary feature about gender identity in Indigenous communities, telling his own story as well as the struggles and triumphs of an Indigenous elder who, like Two Feathers, is a transgender man. “There are not a lot of stories focused on trans masculine people, let alone trans masculine people who are Indigenous. I wanted to be able to provide that,” said Two Feathers, who also identifies as “two-spirit,” a term for the various nonbinary identities that have existed in many Indigenous cultures since long before colonization.
“There is a lot of double erasure of two-spirit identities, Native American identities and Native American women,” McEver said. “But if you look at ‘Night Country,’ if you look at ‘Fancy Dance,’ we’re starting to see the tide shift a little when it comes to the inclusion of Native American women. And I think a lot of that can be attributed to Lily and the power that she brings to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’”
Suyama hopes the increase in Indigenous representation in media leads to increased visibility in other areas. “That’s really where it starts: getting seen in the media,” she said.
Clift agrees. “We’re inspiring Native kids in real time, and that’s what gets me crying.”