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

There was a time when Native Americans were called Indians or Indians, and in cinema they represented the savage past, while the whites were the bright future. Then things changed and “natives” stopped rhyming with “bad guys”. Movies like were conceived “Dance with wolves” And “The Last of the Mohicans”. More recently “The Revenant» handed an Oscar to Leonardo DiCaprio, who spent his acceptance speech 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 secluded supporting actors. 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 premiered on Disney +), the latest chapter in the saga of Predatorone of the milestones of sci-fi cinema, features a young Native American actress with the appropriate surname: Amber Midthunder.

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 eighties. «A female heroine 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 -. Native representation in cinema is becoming very important to our community. At the time 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 field as well».

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

Stierra Teller Ornelas, with comedy Rutherford Falls
which debuted on Peacock last year (this series is also in its second season), holds a record: she is the first Native American in the history of the small screen to have managed to obtain the role of showrunner, a task that he takes lightly: «During the first season we did something important, we showed the general public how Native Americans live in American society today. How they celebrate Halloween, for example. It’s a serious matter, much more than it seems. The hyper-sexualized Pocahontas, for example, of which dozens of succinct versions are seen during the party at the end of October, offends us. In the series we deal with these topics, albeit with humor and lightness. We try to tell each other, to make ourselves known».

Western culture too often 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 put on the pens, painted my face like a warrior and the unease inside me grew. For us those pens are sacred but I had to build a curriculum, 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 maybe today Marlon Brando he would not give up his Oscar, as he did in a sensational gesture in 1973, to protest the treatment of Native Americans in cinema.