“They share a real love for the country and an intent to keep the country as it is,” said Birmingham, who when we spoke was preparing to fly to Montana to shoot Season 5. The way Rainwater sees it, he is simply trying to take back what has been stolen from his people.
Birmingham considers itself lucky to have Sheridan, who also cast the actor in the movie ‘Wind River’, in his corner. He’s an ally when it comes to casting native actors, Birmingham said. Plus, he added, he’s just a great writer.
“His work is unpredictable, and it’s so soulful,” Birmingham said. “It speaks to the hearts of the characters in such a poetic language.”
“I will ride with what he writes,” he added.
Birmingham is old enough to remember watching ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Rawhide’ on their first television series in the 1960s. “They had terrible images of Indigenous people, with lots of red faces,” he said, using a term for when white actors colored their skin to play minstrel versions of Indigenous characters. He recalled his pleasant surprise seeing “Dances With Wolves” in 1990, which brought dignity and different speaking roles to indigenous peoples. (And he appreciated the humor in the fact that it starred and was directed by Costner, his opponent of “Yellowstone”).
Now Birmingham looks around and sees a different, fuller landscape. There’s ‘Yellowstone’ and there’s ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’. There’s the FX comedy “Reservation Dogs,” about four native teens growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma, and there’s “Dark Winds,” the upcoming AMC series about two Navajo police detectives, starring Zahn McClarnon and created by Graham Roland, whose native ancestry is. †
“Now we have projects and productions that tell our story,” Birmingham said. “I think that’s what we’ve been waiting for, this opportunity to be able to tell our own stories from our own point of view.”
