North of North: Indigenous filmmakers take charge of their own stories

On the American sitcom Rutherford Falls, there’s a fake show-within-the-show called Adirondack, an obvious parody of the popular drama Yellowstone.

In Adirondack, the Native American characters are flattened and reduced to harmful stereotypes. There’s a sexy Pocahontas-type while another character says the trees are his grandparents.

Rutherford Falls, which ran for two seasons from 2021, was created by Ed Helms and Michael Schur, but more importantly, also by Sierra Teller Ornelas, a Navajo woman who was frustrated by how non-Native writers and filmmakers told the stories of Indigenous peoples.

The episode was funny and cutting, and was unmistakably a critique of an industry that had spent decades allowing for only stereotypes of cultures they had no actual lived experience of.

Things are changing. On TV and in streaming, there are now nuanced portrayals of Indigenous characters in stories created and written by Indigenous filmmakers.

A week ago, Netflix confirmed a second season had been ordered of North of North, a Canadian comedy about a young woman who lives in the upper reaches of the Arctic.

The show was created by two Inuk women, Stacey Alglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, so it’s a far more textured story than a collection of cliches.

The renewal came less than three weeks after the series dropped on the platform, which means the show must be resonating with audiences globally, and speaks to the appetite that exists for different stories and from different storytellers.

Here’s a selection of indigenous-led TV shows you can watch right now.

NORTH OF NORTH

Siaja is a 26-year-old young mum living in a remote Arctic town who very publicly leaves her husband after years spent as just an appendage to him. She’s out to discover what it means to be her own person and to be seen as more than someone’s wife.

The first step is to land a job with the town manager, and what Siaja knows about her community is indispensable (eg. you don’t salt the snow with salt because it destroys the citizens’ non-chemically treated gumboots). At the same time, the father she never knew just arrived back in town.

CLEVERMAN

With a cast that includes some of Australia’s best Indigenous talent including Hunter Page-Lochard, Rob Collins and Deborah Mailman, this smart and thrilling 2016 reframed Aboriginal Dreamtime stories as a sci-fi superman series.

Created by Ryan Griffen for his son and made by a predominantly Indigenous crew, the story was set in the near-future where “hairypeople” are considered subhuman and ostracised to zones or sent to detention centres, which allows the show to explore themes of racism, power and survival.

RESERVATION DOGS

Reservation Dogs may not have been ordered without the growing influence of producer Taika Waititi but once it was out in the world, there was no doubt this is a show that should always have been made. It was the first American series to feature an all-Indigenous writing room and slate of directors.

The series follows a group of four teenagers in Oklahoma grappling with the death of a friend and generally trying to figure out where they fit in life and what they want from it.

One of the most well-regarded American dramedies of the past few years, Reservation Dogs collected two Peabody Awards among its slew of gongs, and was finally nominated for an Emmy best comedy in its third and final season. But it still remains an under-watched show.

FIREBITE

Created by Australian filmmakers Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher, Firebite is an eight-part horror series that, once again, shows Indigenous storytelling doesn’t have to be boxed in by genre or that everything has to be told “a certain way”.

The show is centred on two vampire hunters who are out to destroy the last remaining colony of the undead that had arrived with the First Fleet. In the universe of the show, there were 11 vampires that arrived from Britain, standing in for the purported 11 vials of smallpox that colonists used as biological weapons against First Nations people.

DARK WINDS

Created by Native American writer Graham Roland, based on the Leaphorn and Chee novels, and starring the incomparable Zahn McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon, Dark Winds is a compulsive crime thriller that already has three seasons under its belt and has been widely lauded for taking time to build out the cultural specificities of its Navajo characters and world.

The show is set in the 1970s and starts with the heist of an armoured car and its perpetrators fleeing into Navajo territory, followed by the murders of two Native people.

RUTHERFORD FALLS

This sitcom has the hallmarks of co-creator Mike Schur’s shows (Parks & Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place) in that it’s warm and doesn’t punch down, and adds the lived experience of its co-creator Sierra Ornelas Teller and its writers and actors including Jana Schmieding and Michael Greyeyes.

The show is set in a small-ish town and is centred on two friends, one a Native woman, Reagan, another a white man, Nathan, who have to navigate their relationship when the town decides to move a statue of Nathan’s ancestor.

ROBBIE HOOD

This SBS webseries was created by Dylan River, who cut his filmmaking teeth working with his dad, Warwick Thornton, including as a cinematographer on Sweet Country, and would go on to make the excellent series Thou Shalt Not Steal.

River transformed the folklore stories of Robin Hood to tell the tale of Robbie, a 13-year-old in Alice Springs with a penchant for “trouble” but only to right some wrongs, even if the authorities don’t always agree. It’s cheeky and fresh.