Browse Netflix, check your local listings, or look up movies at any time of the year, and it doesn’t take a scientist to tell you that Native American and indigenous stories have systemically been left out of our collective media. Those that have risen to the top over the last century (Dances With Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas) have been white-centric and/or have been stories that center around the suffering of indigenous peoples. It’s only in the last few years that, thankfully, stories by Native storytellers — of all kinds — have been given the same chances that thousands of tales of white men and women have been given by TV executives and movie producers; no longer is it that only sad Indian stories pass muster. Peacock’s Rutherford Falls, co-created by Sierra Teller Ornelas, Michael Schurm, and Ed Helms in 2021, was the first comedic sitcom where Native lives were central in the story; that same year, FX greenlit Reservation Dogs, a heartfelt and hilarious take on life on the rez.
The selection of Native narratives is still not where we’d like it to be, but that’s changing, albeit slowly. To celebrate what we can watch, here we’ve compiled a small list of shows, movies, and documentaries that can currently be seen or will be hitting screens in the next few months so you can make sure to watch funny, exciting, silly, ironic, and yes, sometimes scary or sad Native stories.
The Unknown Country (now available)
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Hailed by IndieWire as “a stunning spiritual companion” to the Oscar-winning Nomadland as well as the work of Terrence Malick, The Unknown Country was directed and co-written by Morrisa Maltz, a visual and performance artist whose work has been shown at MOCA in Los Angeles and in galleries around the world. The Unknown Country is her first narrative feature film and stars Lily Gladstone as Tana, an Oglala Lakota woman who is tethered to the past through a photograph that her grandmother took decades earlier. Living a transient lifestyle and reeling from a devastating loss in her life, Tana is pulled back to reality with an invitation to her cousin’s wedding. The reconnection with her family spurs a desire to retrace family history and find connection with people living far from mainstream life.
Maltz made the film with Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, a Lakota Sioux whom Maltz met at a hair salon in South Dakota in 2017 when Maltz was working on her first documentary feature, Ingrid. The Unknown Country premiered at SXSW in 2022 and opened in Los Angeles and New York on July 28. It will be released in several more theaters over the coming months, and you can find local listings through its website.
Dark Winds (now available)
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Much like the best-selling Leaphorn and Chee book series by Tony Hillerman that it’s based on, AMC’s first season of Dark Winds drew audiences in with its riveting tales of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Deputy Jim Chee, played by Zahn McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon, respectively. The show was created by Graham Roland (Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan) and is available to stream on AMC+ or watch on AMC as the six episodes air weekly, and its second season brings us back to Navajo County, where Leaphorn leads the small-but-mighty reservation police. Joined by Leaphorn’s most trusted sidekick, Sergeant Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), the force chases down a bomb-crazy killer, while Chee, now a former deputy turned private eye, has a similar case he’s pursuing. As the two seemingly separate stories converge, old wounds are reopened for Leaphorn, and his patience — not to mention his moral and professional code — is challenged.
The second season also includes guest stars Jeri Ryan, a femme fatale whose weak physicality belies her nefarious ambitions, Nicholas Logan as the twisted assassin with a dark secret, and Jacqueline Byers as a Los Angeles Times reporter hellbent on telling a fair story of Native women’s struggle with maternal health and safety.
With an executive producer team that includes Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin, among others, you know it’s going to be a worthwhile watch.
Reservation Dogs (now available)
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In its third and final season, this laugh-out-loud funny/grab-the-tissues sad series really should be on your radar already. FX’s Reservation Dogs, co-created by Sterlin Harjo (Love and Fury, Barking Water, Four Sheets to the Wind) and Academy Award-winner Taika Waititi, follows a group of rural Oklahoma teens. They’re young, kindred spirits, or as they’d probably prefer to be called, partners in crime, who started out in season one just wanting to get out of their hometown and make it to the shores of California. The foursome — Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor) — begged, borrowed, but mostly stole to try to make this fantasy a reality, and over the first two award-winning seasons, audiences have fallen in love with them and their extended rez families (which even include spirits from the other side).
This 10-episode final season opens with the pack stranded in California after running away. Once they make it back to Okern — with some well-deserved discipline from their elders — Elora considers college, Bear comes across a conspiracy theorist named Maximus (Graham Greene), Willie Jack gets interested in healing her community, and Cheese still lives with his foster grandmother. Fun fact: McClarnon plays a tribal cop in this show too, and there’s a whole cast of characters played by Native super-talents, such as Wes Studi, Lily Gladstone, Richard Ray Whitman, and Jana Schmieding.
Downwind (August 18)
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Downwind — an appropriate companion watch to Oppenheimer — is a documentary that chronicles a dark period of U.S. history when, from 1951 to 1992, the United States government tested nuclear and atomic bombs in the Nevada desert. The downwinder communities, mostly made up of Native Americans, Mormons, and ranchers, continue to suffer the dire health consequences and intergenerational trauma caused by exposure to radioactive fallout from testing.
The film is executive produced by actor and activist Matthew Modine, who also co-stars in Oppenheimer, and whose family was directly affected by the desert testing sites. It’s narrated by Emmy Award-winner Martin Sheen, who protested against the continued testing of nuclear bombs in the late 1980s. And central to the documentary is Ian Zabarte, principal man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians, whose grandfather, cousins, and uncle all died from cancer, with plausible links to radiation exposure. He has been a tireless advocate with the Native Community Action Council and served on the Nevada Desert Experience board, because to this day, the Nevada test site remains active and off-limits and rests on deeded and sacred Shoshone land, without the consent of the Shoshone.
Downwind tells the invigorating tale of American patriot-activists committed to exposing the government’s wrongdoing, working to stop future nuclear weapons testing, and fighting to get Congress to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
Killers of the Flower Moon (October 6)
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Killers of the Flower Moon is the hotly anticipated Martin Scorsese film based on the best-selling nonfiction book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The book and the movie chronicle the rise of Osage Nation as they became some of the richest people in the world overnight after the discovery of oil on their land in the 1920s. Unsurprisingly, the amassed wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white men who extorted and stole as much of their money as they could before resorting to murder.
This epic Western crime drama co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone along with Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, and others, with a screenplay by Scorsese and Oscar-winning screenwriter and producer Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Dune, A Star Is Born, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Get your tickets as soon as you can because this film — which got a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival — is going to be a scorcher.
The American Buffalo (October 16)
Ken Burns for The American Buffalo.
We’ve all heard the tragic story of how the U.S. Army and early Western settlers killed off nearly the entirety of buffalo in North America, but what about the species’ origins, or their integral nature to the very heart of Native American tribes all over the continent? The American Buffalo is a new two-part, four-hour PBS series from award-winning documentarian Ken Burns. Burns takes viewers on a journey through 10,000 years of history and across iconic continental landscapes to trace the giant animal’s evolution. The series studies the significance of buffalo to the ecosystem of the Great Plains, chronicles their near demise, and dives into their relationship with the indigenous people of North America and how important that connection was for both human and animal.
Bookmark your calendars to tune to PBS on October 16 and 17 at 8 p.m. ET to catch this epic journey.
Native America (October 24)
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In its second season, Native America is an important and groundbreaking portrait of life in contemporary Indian country. The four-part series, directed by Natives, fights back against the history books that so often talk about Native Americans in the past tense by showcasing their life, their culture, their people, and the enterprises of today’s indigenous world. Building on the history delved into during the first season, the second season of Native America reveals the tenacity, beauty, and power of today’s Native people who are smashing stereotypes. The audience will be introduced to exciting engineers, tough politicians, and brilliant artists who draw upon their Native traditions to help build a better world for their people and everyone else in the 21st century.
Valentina Valentini is a London-based entertainment, travel, and food writer and is also a senior contributor to Shondaland. Elsewhere, she has written for Vanity Fair, Vulture, Variety, Thrillist, Heated, and The Washington Post. Her personal essays can be read in the Los Angeles Times and Longreads, and her tangents and general complaints can be seen on Instagram @ByValentinaV.
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