I spent a lot of years behind a video store counter shortly after leaving the Marines as means to make money. It was one of my favorite second jobs that i held. I worked both at Blockbuster and Hollywood video in Jersey. I can tell you exactly where Native characters lived on the shelves. Westerns. Row after row of Westerns, and in most of them the Native characters existed to be chased, feared, or killed by the last reel. Sometimes they got a noble speech first. Sometimes the actor wasn’t even Native.
The door cracks open
Dances with Wolves hit in 1990 and, flaws and all, it put Native actors on screen speaking their own language in a movie that swept the Oscars. Graham Greene earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for it. Wes Studi stole scenes, then went on to The Last of the Mohicans and Geronimo: An American Legend. Studi eventually received an honorary Oscar in 2019, which tells you both how good he was and how long it took.
Then 1998 gave us Smoke Signals, written by Sherman Alexie and directed by Chris Eyre. It’s widely recognized as the first feature written, directed, and produced by Native Americans to reach a wide audience. I remember realizing I was watching Native people be funny, flawed, tender, and completely human. Nobody was in war paint. Nobody was a mystic. A road trip, a dead father, and Adam Beach and Evan Adams making me laugh and then wrecking me. Up north, the Inuit epic Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner arrived in 2001 and won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, a reminder that Indigenous cinema had never needed Hollywood’s permission.
Then came the last few years
However something shifted, and I don’t think it was an accident. Native creators stopped asking for a seat and built the table.
Reservation Dogs premiered in 2021, created by Sterlin Harjo (Seminole and Muscogee) with Taika Waititi (Māori). It was the first show on cable TV where all the writers, directors, and regular characters were Indigenous. It was shot on the Muscogee Nation reservation, and it was funny and strange and heartbreaking in a way TV rarely is. Prey followed in 2022 with Amber Midthunder (Comanche) as a lead action hero in a Predator movie, and it was even released with a Comanche-language dub. Dark Winds gave us Zahn McClarnon doing some of the best work on television. Echo in 2024 brought Alaqua Cox (Menominee), a Deaf Native actress, into the Marvel universe as a lead.
And then Killers of the Flower Moon. Lily Gladstone (Blackfeet and Nimiipuu) carried Martin Scorsese’s film with a performance so quiet and devastating you could feel the theater hold its breath. She won the Golden Globe, the first Indigenous winner in that category, and became the first Native American nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. That should have happened decades ago. It didn’t, and that’s the story.
So how are Native people actually treated in Hollywood?
Here’s where you would think we would end on a good note.
The study’s author put it bluntly: there’s no career sustainability for Native actors in Hollywood. I think that’s the sentence to really pay attention to. You can’t build a career on one great role every decade.
Here’s what I love about the way this story is changing, though. The progress isn’t coming because Hollywood suddenly woke up. It’s coming because Native writers, directors, and show-runners made the work, proved the audience was there, and kept going. Organizations like Vision Maker Media, which just marked 50 years of supporting Native filmmakers, have been feeding that pipeline quietly for decades.
Here is something I would suggest for you, watch something this week. Start with Smoke Signals if you’ve never seen it. Stream Reservation Dogs. Rent Prey. Look at who wrote it and who directed it, not just who’s on screen. And if you’re a filmmaker or a fan, ask the question every time: where are the Native people in this story, and did they get to tell it?
That’s the entire ask. Hollywood spent a century telling stories about Indigenous people. The best thing it can do now is hand over the camera.
