For Comanche actor Gil Birmingham, who plays the lead role Yellowstone As the leader of the fictional Broken Rock tribe, creating alliances between Native Americans and non-Natives alike is crucial, both on-screen and off.
While Birmingham’s character Thomas Rainwater has had his ups and downs with Kevin Costner’s Montana rancher John Dutton, the actor praises series creator Taylor Sheridan as an indigenous ally.
Sheridan has faced criticism in the Native community for his work on the show, which airs its final episodes on November 10 on the Paramount Network. The writer, director and producer have been called out by some for trying to tell Indigenous stories through a white lens – and profiting from it.
Birmingham has worked on the show for five seasons and says Sheridan’s approach to including Indigenous stories is misunderstood.
“Taylor does what he can and uses all the resources he has access to to make things as real and authentic as possible,” Birmingham told Yahoo Entertainment. “Mo Brings Plenty, my partner on the show, is an elder from the Lakota reservation [and] grew up with the culture. He knows these things, and he is our cultural advisor.”
Birmingham said he understands the “legitimate” concerns of Indigenous people. “They feel like these stories are being exploited because they weren’t written by an Indigenous man,” he explained.
He said there are several obstacles that native creatives face in Hollywood.
“The economic conditions are not such that we can just do these things ourselves,” Birmingham said. “That’s the goal, but my experience in my career is that it takes an alliance and collaboration of allies to be able to, you know, move that foot forward.”
In Yellowstonewhich concludes its fifth and final season, Rainwater has forged a sometimes shaky alliance with Dutton, who is determined to protect his family’s land from the Broken Rock tribe — the original inhabitants of the land his family is on — and other encroaching forces.
In addition to confrontations, the two leaders have also had to figuratively stand together against other threats – a power dynamic Birmingham calls Sheridan and the series an Indigenous character on the same level as a non-Indigenous character.
“Rainwater and Mo are portrayed as equals and not as peripheral characters who are powerless,” he said. “They are, so to speak, in the arena with the life challenges and the issues, Indigenous issues, that need to be addressed.”
Considering how Native characters have been portrayed on screen throughout Hollywood history — the “bloodthirsty warrior” or “needy destitute” — Birmingham said Sheridan’s respectful inclusion of modern Native characters is more than a step forward.
“The ultimate challenge is to get people to see Indigenous people as human beings and not as they have been portrayed for the past few hundred years,” he said.
It’s the “complexity” and “complicated nature” of Rainwater that the actor, who also starred in Sheridan’s 2017 film Wind Riverabout the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, Yahoo Entertainment said he will remember most about his character.
“[Rainwater is] presented in terms of an indigenous character in the present day and a character who embodied intelligence and agency and influence and, you know, playing the settler mind game, and how to achieve the same goals that, for different reasons, John Dutton also had .”
That push and pull with Costner’s Dutton will be somewhat different in the final six episodes Horizon: an American saga director and star announced his official departure from the series in June.
Birmingham noted that because Rainwater “was written to have maybe one scene per season [Dutton],” Costner’s absence “didn’t change much” for his character.
As the series comes to an end, Birmingham said he will “miss the people we got to spend seven years with, and all the camaraderie and the relationships and memories and great times we had.”
Many of those memories are about Indigenous stories, which he said were told “respectfully” and meant to “spark the curiosity and interest of people who want to learn and see us as people.”
When it comes to telling more authentic Indigenous stories, Birmingham called out “the need to develop more Indigenous writers, directors and actors” to tell them.
“Until then,” he said, “I hope we can appreciate the importance of alliances, like John Dutton and Rainwater.”
Yellowstone Season 5, Part 2 premieres November 10 at 8 PM ET on Paramount Network and at 10 PM ET on CBS.
