Hollywood has never had a reluctance to show Native characters onscreen. They’ve served as the go-to foils for the hero in the most American of movie genres — the Western — and occasionally have been romanticized for their exotic mysticism, their cultural practices and presentation adopted (or appropriated, as some might say) in order to imbue a sense of depth or artistry to a white practitioner. In more recent years, the historical and ongoing experience of many Indigenous communities’ battles to preserve their lands and defend their sovereignty has been allegorized into big-budget fantasy blockbusters.

But in between the two Avatar movies, the landscape for Native Americans in media has shifted. In 2009, when James Cameron’s first trip to Pandora premiered in theaters on the way to earning nine Oscar nominations (three wins) and becoming the top-grossing film of all time ($2.9 billion worldwide), some critics and audience members noted the plot’s evocations of Native narratives, disguised in a literally alien form. Indigenous people instantly recognized the similarities too — not that they could do much about it.

“My sense in talking with a lot of people is that you had all these Indigenous creatives working in Hollywood, but they felt very isolated. They didn’t feel supported,” says IllumiNative founder Crystal Echo Hawk, who launched the social justice organization in 2018. “I heard it was like pushing a boulder up the hill in 2010. You talk to anybody working in Hollywood at that time, they’ll tell you how hard it was, how many times studio executives told them the only way they’re gonna care about Indigenous stories is if you show up in this tropey, pre-1900 way. You think about the [Reservation Dogs creator] Sterlin Harjos, the [producer] Bird Runningwaters, others that have been toiling in this industry for up to 20 years. I think it would have been hard for anyone back then to imagine what we’re experiencing now.”

That now is a still small but growing library of Native-led or Native-centered content in mainstream film and television, which includes Harjo’s Indie Spirit-winning FX comedy, as well as the AMC thriller series Dark Winds, Disney+’s upcoming Marvel series Echo and Hulu’s critically acclaimed Predator prequel Prey, which the streamer said was its most-watched premiere ever.

Several Native industry insiders credit activity outside Hollywood for the sea change. “I think a lot of it has to do with the social movements that have occurred,” says Jana Schmieding, a writer and star on Peacock’s comedy Rutherford Falls, which ran for two seasons in 2021-22. “We’ve seen a growth in an audience’s literacy around Black and Indigenous issues and also a simultaneous push from Indigenous people — we saw it during Standing Rock in 2016 — raising an alarm and flexing our sovereignty.”

The nearly yearlong grassroots protest over plans to construct the Dakota Access Pipeline near the reservation captured public attention (and even drew Hollywood allies). “Up until then, contemporary Native stories just hadn’t been covered in media in any real way outside of stories through the white gaze. The Standing Rock protests blew up on Twitter and basically forced the hand of mass media outlets,” says Joey Clift, a writer on the Netflix animated series Spirit Rangers. “That started a greater public understanding that one, we’re still here, and two, our stories are important. That started a lot of wheels turning.”

The rise of social media has also amplified the voices of cultural communities who previously did not have access to such broad, mass communication platforms. “If you’re making a show about Native people, and you didn’t have any Native people work on it, and it’s obviously problematic, Native Twitter is going to light it up — not in a good way. Social media has allowed non-Natives to think about Native representation in a more critical light than maybe they were equipped to in 2009,” Clift continues, “and it’s allowed us as Native people to connect and collaborate with each other creatively. It’s really connected us to each other as a people.”

Clift notes that Harjo’s roots were in the popular YouTube Native sketch comedy group the 1491s and that he recently hired an Ojibwe animator for his Comedy Central digital series after discovering him on Twitter. “Native people, we’re using our organizing understanding,” adds Schmieding of the collective work on the industry front, such as the open letter that the WGA West’s Native American and Indigenous Writers’ Committee submitted in October 2020 demanding more equitable and accurate representation across the business. “We want storytelling sovereignty. We’re no longer tolerating white people telling our stories without us. And we also have been pigeonholed as consultants where we should have been getting writing and producing credits for generations. That puts us at an economic disadvantage, and it puts the story at a disadvantage as well.”

Multiple diversity studies have shown that creators from systemically excluded backgrounds have better track records of diverse hiring. The significance of Indigenous showrunners installing fellow Indigenous creatives and production crew members in positions of power is that they have chosen to devote their resources and time to creating pipelines of improved representation (whereas white directors might otherwise focus their energies toward perfecting the imitation of water dripping down the skin of a CGI alien). These Native artists have created a system that wasn’t there, which makes ignoring those resources feel more egregious in 2023, according to Clift.

“The excuse is no longer there, that there are no qualified, talented Indigenous people to work on these things,” agrees Echo Hawk. “What we’re increasingly finding is how many Native people have been working in the industry forever, in animation or different facets of production, but they’ve been overlooked. We’re fighting to get investment in our stories — not more consulting roles — because everybody keeps mining our stories and culture. We fundamentally have to shift this very extractive, exploitative model that has been pervasive in Hollywood for the longest time.”

The practice of hiring Indigenous creatives as consultants has continued as active series begin to mine the dramatic potential in plotlines such as historical atrocities committed against Native Americans (Paramount+’s 1923) and ongoing events like the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (ABC’s Alaska Daily). The casting community has also remained predominantly white, with exceptions like Paramount’s Stacey Rice and Tricia Wood, explains casting director Angelique Midthunder. 

Still, Midthunder — not Indigenous herself but who has cast Native-led ensembles for the last three decades and whose husband and daughter, actor David Midthunder and Prey star Amber Midthunder, are enrolled in the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribe — says that productions have been far more proactive than 10 years ago about reaching out to consult on even a single episode or to ensure they are casting Indigenous actors, who, when possible, are tribally specific. As Clift notes, that shift impacted the Avatar sequel, which cast Māori actor Cliff Curtis as the leader of an Oceanic clan of Na’vi that was inspired by Polynesian culture. 

It’s encouraging those in the industry, as they continue to push for more inclusion, to find reason for optimism. “We’re having so much success with shows like Reservation Dogs because no one could tell that story except for the people that come from those communities, and they can tell it in an authentic way that’s funny or dramatic that we can all relate to,” says Midthunder, who worked on both that show and Rutherford Falls. “Hopefully that’s the tip of the spear for what’s to come. My hope is that now that people see that you can have a successful big-budget studio film [like Prey] with Indigenous storytelling, they will be open-minded to creating more content like that. I think people are hungry for it.”