Revenge of the Native Americans: Hollywood opens its doors to Indian actors

There was a time when Native Americans called themselves Indians or Native Americans, and in the cinema they represented the wild past, while whites were the bright future. Then things changed and the “natives” stopped rhyming with “bad guys”. Films like “Dance with wolves” And “The last of the Mohicans”. More recently “The Revenant»Presented an Oscar to Leonardo DiCaprio, who spent his acceptance speech for the award honoring indigenous peoples and pledging to do everything to protect them.

DiCaprio, Kevin Costner, Daniel Day-Lewis: the protagonists for a long time still continued to be white. The natives, although now on the right side, remained behind the scenes. Today, finally, in this new Hollywood that is politically correct and increasingly attentive to minorities, things are starting to change seriously. “Prey», Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (which debuted on Disney +), the latest chapter in the saga of Predatorone of the milestones of sci-fi cinema, stars a young Native American actress, with the appropriate surname: Amber Midthunder, mezzotuono.

Amber plays Naru, the girl who will succeed to give the alien Yautja a hard time no less than the muscular Arnold Schwarzenegger had managed to do in the 1980s. “A heroine woman is perhaps becoming the norm in Hollywood, but that a girl belonging to a small tribe in Montana, the Sioux of Fort Peck, is the protagonist of a great science fiction film, is not so obvious and it is a sign that something is really changing – says the young actress -. The portrayal of natives in cinema is becoming very important to our community. In the days of the western epics of the last century, we natives had much harder battles to fight than our representation in the cinema. Now is the time to do something in this area too ».

And so, together with Amber Midthunder, a small army of new recruits is doing something. Devery Jacobs, Lane Factor, Paulina Alexis and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, for example, are the protagonists of Reservation Dogs», Whose second season is about to be released in the US. The series, from FX and signed by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi (the director of «Thor: Love and Thunder»), Recounts the adolescence of four friends in an eastern Oklahoma reservation.

S.ierra Teller Ornelas, with comedy “Rutherford Falls”
which debuted on Peacock last year (this series has also reached its second season), holds a record: it is the first Native American in the history of the small screen to be able to get the role of showrunner, a task that does not takes it lightly: “During the first season we did something important, we showed the general public how Native Americans live in today’s American society. How they celebrate Halloween, for example. It is a serious matter, much more than it seems. The hyper-sexualized Pocahontas, for example, of which we see dozens of succinct versions during the late October party, offends us. In the series we deal with these topics, albeit with humor and lightness. We try to tell about ourselves, to make ourselves known ».

Western culture too many times she moved to the cinema like the classic elephant in the china shop. Brian Young is a filmmaker of Navajo origins: «At the beginning of my career I accepted everything. The choice was between giving up a profession I loved, or accepting what was offered to me and thus being able to pay the bills. I wore pens, painted my warrior face and the unease inside me grew. For us those pens are sacred but I had to build a resume, I had to accept to play the shaman. Then one day I said enough. I would no longer have compromised with my spirituality and now I finally don’t have to do it anymore ”.

We are only at the beginning, but perhaps today Marlon Brando he would not give up his Oscar, as he did with a sensational gesture in 1973, to protest the treatment of Native Americans in the cinema.