Their Shows Might Be Over, but They’re Just Getting Started
However exciting it was for Lily Gladstone to receive her own first Emmy nomination for her work in the Hulu series “Under the Bridge,” the more meaningful aspect of her Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie nod was seeing “True Detective: Night Country” breakout Kali Reis be honored as well. “I love that I’m not alone in this category. Having just had a bunch of first time historical monikers applied to me, there’s something that’s very lonely about that,” the recent Oscar nominee told IndieWire over Zoom. “So it’s great to carry that with another actress who turned in just this stellar performance, and then just represents a whole other aspect of how diverse and how important it is to highlight how diverse Indian country is.”
In a separate conversation, Reis echoes Gladstone’s sentiments about what it means for them being the first Indigenous women to be nominated in the same category, and for acting Emmys in general. “It’s not a me thing. It’s a we thing,” said the past Independent Spirit Award nominee. “I think of that little kid that looks like me that maybe has aspirations of doing something really big. And then they go, ‘Oh snap— Wow. It’s possible.’ So if this means hope for other kids that look like us and even elders, even just our people that say, ‘Wow, there’s this hope,’ then that feels amazing.”
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That morning of July 14, 2024, even more Emmys history was made, with the final season of FX critical darling “Reservation Dogs” receiving four Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for star D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (who is also the first Native actor to be nominated in his category.) There was no denying that this would be a banner year for Indigenous representation at the Primetime Emmys, but it begs the question what’s next, given how the three aforementioned shows are all over. Is this just a moment in culture, or an indication that even more Indigenous stories on platforms as big as FX, HBO, or Hulu are on the way?
Woon-A-Tai seems reassured. “Shows have ended and series have finished, and new seasons are going on with different content, but I think that this is just the beginning,” said “Reservation Dogs” star to IndieWire. “We shoved our foot in the door and we’re staying. I don’t think the hype will die down.” For him, the conversation around this increased attention toward Native-led projects is nothing new. “When I was first doing interviews for the first season, second season, I got that phrase like, ‘What a moment it is.’ And I think that’s not going to be the case. To look at it as a moment would be wrong, because as Native people, we’ve been in the film industry since the beginning,” said the young actor.
For his part, “Reservation Dogs” creator Sterlin Harjo had come to terms with the idea that his groundbreaking comedy would forever be overlooked by the Television Academy. Just getting the chance to make it, and be the one to say it should end with Season 3, was the reward. “I’m very proud and honored to be nominated for an Emmy, and alongside everybody else that I look up to, and I’m proud to be a part of this entertainment community, if you will, but man, the giant leaps of change have happened and we’ve already experienced it. We’re on the other side of that now,” he said over Zoom. “So that’s why I say it’s very hard to really frame the Emmy nomination in a way that’s like, ‘I’m blown away.’ I am very excited, I am very grateful, and I’m very happy, but again, the show is what blew me away.”
Despite their differences, with one being a comedy, another being a true crime series, and the last being the latest chapter of a supernatural-tinged murder mystery anthology, these Native-led shows have already brought something fresh to the TV landscape that goes past visual representation. “Reservation Dogs” has built up Oklahoma as an attractive shooting location. “I love this place and I love the influence that Native people have had here, and it’s a very unique place. I’ve always seen the beauty in it,” says Harjo of the southern state. “I’ve always wanted to tell the stories from here. And so with that also, I wanted to help grow an arts community and a film community, and I was able to do that with the show all in one. We trained and there were so many careers built out of the show, people that weren’t in film, and now they are working right now in film. And we built a whole crew base here that works on all these movies that are coming through, including ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ ‘Twisters,’ things like that.”
Both Gladstone and Reis also played characters that were very much tailored to the setting of their series. For instance, knowing their character Cam Bentland, an Indigenous woman that was adopted by a white Canadian family, was a creation of the series, Gladstone went into her meeting with “Under the Bridge” writers Quinn Shephard and Samir Mehta with a checklist to make sure that their intent with the character was to address things like the Sixties Scoop, with ripped Native children from their families and into the adoption system, and how the restorative justice work that Warren Glowatski, one of the perpetrators in the Reena Virk case that the show depicts, did stemmed from his Native ancestry. “The victim is the highest priority in those cases. And I feel like that’s the whole point of the show as well, is that Reena is not a flashback. She’s not a montage of images of a girl that we are told we’re supposed to care about. We actually get to learn about her and care about her,” she said.
Though the writers had already included in advance many of the Native elements she was looking out for upon meeting them, Gladstone was the one who pitched the wistful final scene featuring Bentland. “When you are in Burrard Inlet, when you’re around Tsleil-Waututh Nation, when you’re anywhere in Vancouver in the islands during that time of year, you’re going to see kids out there pulling canoes, getting ready for Canoe Journey. So it was my thought that maybe she pulls up to Canoe Journey because you see so many kids do it,” she said.
Similarly, Reis knew her Afro-Indigenous ancestry, being both Cape Verdean and a member of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe, made her especially suited to play the half Dominican, half Inupiaq state trooper Evangeline Navarro on “True Detective: Night Country,” just with her feeling like “she’s not enough for either side of what she is,” said the actress. But to play an Alaska Native specifically, she leaned on producers Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Cathy Tagnak Rexford, who share that background, to make sure the character would capture the nuances of that community. “That’s how we get raised. It’s like, ‘Listen, how do you want to see yourself portrayed on screen? Tell me stories. Let me know what it was like to grow up.’ I really want to make sure that we have the opportunities to do it correctly,” said Reis.
The conclusion of “True Detective: Night Country,” highlighting some of its Native actors that had mostly stayed in the background, was a twist the star did not see coming, but thoroughly appreciated. “Coming from the Native community, the nosy-ass aunties know everything. They know everything. If you want to know the tea, go to Auntie’s house,” said Reis. “Also on a serious note, the invisibility, the very thing that is something that we ‘are’ or people look at us or don’t look at Native people, especially Native women, as invisible, that invisibility is the very thing that was a superpower.” It reflected the ways in which indigenous organizations have to take finding answers for missing and murdered indigenous women into their own hands in a way Gladstone also found “invigorating.”
Having watched the first season of the HBO series, which starts with a dead woman near the Mexican border, the actress said she had talked to the new “True Detective” helmer Issa López about how the franchise could “address femicide of Indigenous women regardless of every border. So when I knew that that show was coming together and taking the direction that it did, I was just so elated because I knew that it was like, ‘Oh, there it is. Somebody noticed that too.’ And how successful it was for it.”
Intentionality came up often in these conversations about Native representation, even if the next projects they work on are not focused on telling a Native story specifically. “What people know about our culture is pop culture, so we [now] have to have the opportunity in pop culture to change that narrative,” said Woon-A-Tai. “My hope is that with these nominations, with our work… is that it won’t be a novelty. It won’t be a special appearance. It’ll be a normal occurrence that you see Native stories, Indigenous stories, all underrepresented communities that have these stories, done the right way,” said Reis. “I will always try to do my best to personally represent. So if you see me in a Marvel movie, at least you know, ‘Oh, that’s Kali Reis. I know that she speaks a lot about missing, murdered Indigenous women. She’s a huge mouthpiece for all these things that matter.’ That’s kind of where I’m going with my career.”
Part of what makes “Reservation Dogs” such a storytelling achievement is that Harjo had concluded the central arc of the leads mourning their childhood friend with Season 2, which allowed for Season 3 to function more like an extended epilogue. “[That] really helped it transition the show into really, what it wanted to be and what it was meant to be, which is about community,” said the creator.
In writing the series finale, Harjo fit in a metanarrative that comforted the audience about the prospects of not just the characters’ futures, but the futures of those who worked on the show behind the scenes. “That last episode is definitely a hug and a ‘Don’t worry, this is all going to work out’ message to the crew and to the people— to the audience, to the actors, to these characters, to the story. It was for all of that,” he said. “I was saying goodbye to the whole thing. It was an experience that changed my life forever and a lot of people’s lives around me and a lot of people’s lives in the greater community. And I think that we’re going to realize that this show changed a lot more as time goes by.”
Gladstone, who also starred in the “Reservation Dogs” series finale, as well as a pivotal Season 2 episode, said “the show ended partly because they were having scheduling difficulties because all of the actors were in such high demand. It’s a good thing. It’s not the be-all and end-all. We’re at this point where now there’s interest from a lot of different directions that started pulling a lot of the folks making it together in a lot of different directions themselves.” She alone has projects in development with three “Reservation Dogs” writers, including Harjo, who has even more projects in the works with his former staff.
So ultimately, though one could still see Native representation at this year’s Emmys through a glass-half-empty lens, with the three recognized shows being long gone, actually talking to the nominees suggests the cup is about to runneth over with the amount of new Native-led shows they are creating. “The Emmys ain’t ready for the Natives showing up, is all I got to say, because we’re rolling deep,” said Reis. “We’ve never really been here, and now we’re all here and we’re bringing everybody with us, so there goes the neighborhood,” added Harjo. “We’re going to really disrupt some things, I hope, now.”
Additional reporting by Proma Khosla.
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