Native representation in television and film has been historically abysmal. When Native characters do pop up, they are typically one-dimensional, and often embody exhausting tropes, like the “drunken Indian” or the picturesque murder victim. But the Peacock sitcom Rutherford Falls offers audiences something entirely different: multidimensional Native characters who defy stereotypes and embody the contradictions that Native people in the U.S. are often faced with in their daily lives. The show was cocreated by Ed Helms, Michael Schur, and Sierra Teller Ornelas. Ornelas is a Navajo and Mexican-American showrunner, screenwriter, and filmmaker. Her cultural knowledge, as a sixth-generation Navajo weaver who also spent years working in museums, helped shape the sitcom, which is a story about identity, the deconstruction of historical nostalgia, and whether personal relationships can survive honest reckonings with history.
Jana Schmieding: Well, it’s interesting because this is my first staff writing job, my first time writing for TV, so I was also learning a lot in the room and learning a lot about not only how to structure a TV show, but also collaborating with other Native people in comedy, and I think, sort of making sure that we were having in-depth, rich conversations about these issues. But the topic of [Native] tropes, and what to avoid, never directly came up in the room, probably because we just weren’t, that’s just not how we write in our daily lives. It’s in the same way that if you were to write [a story], you wouldn’t write in the language of tropes, you would write a character, a whole character, and in order to write good characters, you give them an internal life, you give them a family, you give them a world, you give them opinions and beliefs.
It’s so funny that you bring that up because I haven’t listened to it in such a long time, and I forgot that almost the entire episode is about her coming into this position of being a showrunner, being an executive producer, and I was just like, “Wait, how did you get there? Like, how did you do it?” I was just like mining her for information, for intel. That was actually the beginning of what eventually became our friendship and our coworking relationship.
I know Native creators like Sierra have waged a long struggle to get here, but I also feel like Black and trans artists have really kicked some doors open in recent years in terms of proving that Hollywood was wrong, and that marginalized stories aren’t niche, unmarketable content. Are there particular shows or projects that you feel really helped lay the groundwork to make Rutherford Falls possible?
