Worlds Unseen
Interview by Ted Genoways
Photographs by Shane Brown
Ethan Hawke went running by, struggling to do up the pearl snaps on his Western shirt, before ducking into Magic City Books. His pants were the same shade of magenta as the bruises on his cheekbone and around his eye. On the other side of Archer Street in the Arts District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the camera cut, and director Sterlin Harjo seemed ready to move on.
Harjo had started filming a few weeks earlier on the pilot for a new series called The Sensitive Kind. The main character, played by Hawke, is a tribute to Tulsa legend Lee Roy Chapman, right down to his signature tattoos and straw hat. Chapman, who died in 2015, was a self-trained historian and independent journalist who founded the Center for Public Secrets. Through a series of exposés in the pages of This Land, a small but influential independent magazine where Harjo was the staff video director, Chapman fearlessly sought to force conversations about hidden aspects of Tulsa’s past. “Lee Roy was a seeker of truth,” Harjo tells me here. It’s easy to see why he so admires Chapman. Like Chapman, Harjo, too, is heavily tattooed, has a taste for Western shirts, and a love of old-style hats. And he, too, is a seeker of truth.
Harjo, a citizen of the Seminole and Muscogee nations of Oklahoma, was born and raised in Holdenville. He grew up watching movies on pirated HBO but initially went to the University of Oklahoma to study art. It was only while he was a student there that he found his way into film. He made a series of independent features—Four Sheets to the Wind (2007), Barking Water (2009), and Mekko (2015)—as well as the documentary This May Be the Last Time (2014), the story of the 1962 disappearance of Harjo’s grandfather and the Native American hymns that keep the stories of the dead alive. All were positively reviewed, but nothing could have predicted the breakout success that Harjo experienced with Reservation Dogs, co-created with Academy Award winning filmmaker Taika Waititi.
For twenty-eight pitch-perfect episodes on Hulu, running from 2021 to 2023, Reservation Dogs was the groundbreaking story of a group of four teens coping with the death of one of their friends. The storylines blended humor and heartbreak and combined elements of traditional Native storytelling, parodies of Hollywood classics, urban myths, pop music, and zany side quests to create a rich and recognizable portrait of a complex and vital community. The American Film Institute named all three seasons to its list of Top 10 Programs of the Year. The show was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Emmy. More importantly, it remade the culture—bringing regional and rez slang (from skoden to shit-ass) into the popular lexicon.
The sudden success has opened a range of opportunities for Harjo, but he has chosen to keep locating his storytelling—and his show-running—in Oklahoma. During the filming of The Sensitive Kind, the cast turned up all over town in Tulsa—at Prism Café for lunch, at Tina’s on South Boston for drinks and late-night burgers, at Circle Cinema, where Harjo and Hawke screened a sneak-peek preview of Wildcat, Hawke’s biopic of Flannery O’Connor, starring his daughter Maya Hawke. To Harjo, keeping his storytelling as specific and rooted as possible is the key to his success. He has whole worlds yet to explore in Oklahoma, and he has a community of artists, musicians, and filmmakers that he’s hoping to help build.
Ted Genoways: David Treuer wrote a profile of you for The Atlantic that quoted a friend describing you as a “community guy.” I thought that was a great observation. I first saw you give the Presidential Lecture at the University of Tulsa, but since then, I’ve seen you around town at all sorts of places: Chimera Café, art openings, Lowood restaurant—before it sadly burned down. And then we actually met at this new songwriter series, the St. Cecilia’s Listening Room, that’s in the basement of a church in North Tulsa. You really are out in the community.
Sterlin Harjo: You know, the whole fame thing and the success of Reservation Dogs is great, but also I can tell you: if that didn’t happen, people wouldn’t be surprised to see me. I’ve always been a community person—and specifically in Tulsa. I love supporting musicians. I love supporting artists. I just put out a new video that I directed for Ken Pomeroy and the last one before that was the Turnpike Troubadours and Jacob Tovar. I love throwing support behind people and trying to help. I’ve always known that community can make everything better and stronger. And if we try to focus on that, while we work on our own stuff, singularly, I think that the community uplifts, and it becomes this kind of support system. It’s cheesy and sounds silly, but it’s like planting seeds and then all of a sudden you have a garden, instead of just one plant.
TG: This question of community is interesting to me, because I see this worldview, this attitude, in the way that Reservation Dogs is constructed. It’s really a show without a main character. Everyone feels equally important within the community that’s created in the show.
SH: You’re right. I think what’s cool about Reservation Dogs is how people responded to this, because I didn’t necessarily start out with this plan. I knew it was happening. I knew that’s where it was going. But I didn’t know it’d be so noticeable. The idea that all of a sudden it becomes not about four kids but about a whole community, I love that. And I love that people feel it. Now other people recognize it as something that they hadn’t seen. But it’s not like Native representation in film has had a bunch of good examples. We’re building on what we’ve had, which is hundreds of years of really bad representation. I wanted to tell this sprawling tale that came from our community that touched on a lot of things without being preachy at all, without trying to shove a message down anyone’s throat. And the only way to do that was to represent the whole community and give weight to everyone in that community. And I think that was just reflecting home.
“You can just tell in movies when a small town or rural areas are treated a certain way. I hated the movie, Nebraska. Everyone’s dumb, just really country, and they’re aliens. Some of the smartest people I know are from rural America, rural Oklahoma.”
But also, they’re needed. I think Reservation Dogs is a bit violent in its conception and attack. There’s a lot of things that are talked about in there that had never been talked about before. I felt like we were trying to catch up. We needed to do a lot and do a lot fast, whether it’s not stigmatizing suicide and being able to talk about that because it is prevalent in our communities, or talking about the importance of friendship, talking about the importance of uncles and aunties and how they also are part of raising you, talking about our humor and our music and life, and then there’s also boarding schools and the Deer Lady mythologies. I needed to cram everything into a show, eloquently. And it had to be about a community to do that.
TG: And this is talked about as being a breakthrough, as you said, of Native representation. But to me, it feels even more specific to Oklahoma, specific to small-town Oklahoma, where there is all of this kind of mixing together.
SH: I think small-town Oklahoma is one of the most diverse places in the world. No one knows that. I grew up in a hometown of 5,000 people. Holdenville is more diverse than Tulsa, as far as people going to school together and eating at the same places. You can go to a restaurant in Holdenville, Pat’s Cafe, right now and you’ll find every walk of life there. Everybody knows each other and everybody’s a part of that community. I wanted to show that. Some people might think, oh, the diversity police got to him, and he wanted to fill the frame with every race and whatever. But it’s not that. It’s a reflection of rural Oklahoma.
TG: Absolutely. I also love the fact that, while Reservation Dogs is set in a small town, it doesn’t pretend—the way a lot of dramatized versions of small towns do—that it’s a kind of bubble that nothing penetrates. The thing that motivates the whole storyline is this group of kids looking to go to California. But it’s so much more than that. Everything that permeates the atmosphere is coming from the outside as much as it is coming from the inside.
SH: That’s how it was growing up in a small town. Depending on what was popular at the time, there was a point where we thought we were gangsters in South Central L.A. with Boyz n the Hood and gangsta rap. And then Dazed and Confused dropped on us and we all became hippies, Texas hippies, and we liked driving hot rods and smoking a lot of weed. We were very influenced from the outside. You can just tell in movies when a small town or rural areas are treated a certain way. I hated the movie, Nebraska. Everyone’s dumb, just really country, and they’re aliens. Some of the smartest people I know are from rural America, rural Oklahoma. If the shit hit the fan and the zombie apocalypse happened, I wouldn’t be hanging out with my friends in Tulsa. I would go home. I’ll hang out with my friends in Tulsa at a nice restaurant or go watch a band play but not if there’s a zombie apocalypse.
TG: And that’s the thing, right? This shows up with the characters on Reservation Dogs. They know gangsta rap, but they also know how to dress a deer carcass. And like you said, your friends in Tulsa probably don’t know that.
SH: They know where burger night is. Or Taco Tuesday. But during the apocalypse, I don’t know if we can find tacos being made.
TG: And I want to say, too, your film Mekko is kind of the inverse of the story arc of Reservation Dogs. It’s a story about small towns and the desire to get to the city where there’s this belief that things are going to be better or different, that you can move your life forward—but it’s not that simple.
SH: All of my films are about coming back home or leaving home. When I wrote Mekko, that’s kind of what it was about to me. It was Mekko going from his small town, finding a community on the streets, and then seeing a darkness invading that community and breaking it apart. It was also sort of an allegory for the Dawes Act and the Dawes Commission—how the government broke up our community and slowly poisoned the original nature of the way that we live and what we hold important—and I did it through the streets of Tulsa and people living on the streets.
But Mekko is about a few things. We were doing This Land at the time right before that. And This Land was pretty beautiful in that we saw it change Tulsa. I don’t know if anyone would ever say that other than people that were there and saw it happen with me, but it definitely did. I think Tulsa is the way it is right now, because of This Land, because of that storytelling. And I think that’s how powerful storytelling is. It gave Tulsa an identity: there’s the Race Massacre that people are trying to hide and not talk about, and there’s all this other darkness, but there’s also a lot of things to be proud of. And it was really beautiful. And I think back on it very fondly.
TG: Talking about the transformational power of storytelling, take us back to the beginning. Where does that come from for you? What do your early experiences of storytelling look like? How does storytelling come into your life?
SH: A lot of ways. We had great storytellers in my house and at my grandma’s house. And it was a mix of Native storytelling and rural storytelling, which I think is important, because that’s how we entertain ourselves. They would talk about death, about people that are gone. They would tell old stories about people and they were always funny. My cousins would run around and have fun, but I would rather sit in the kitchen and listen to the adults tell stories. And that’s the way storytelling first came to me.
And then, I went to Indian Baptist churches where there were preachers that were like tent revival almost, but in a Native way, and you’d hear them yelling stories. I spent weekends with my white grandma, and she was one of the best storytellers in the world. She was from Sasakwa, Oklahoma, and she could remember everything. She talked about everyone, and she always had these nicknames for everyone. You would think that it was a metropolis of mythological creatures and really interesting people, like a Medieval city. I know I got a lot from her.
And my mom was a hairdresser. I remember hanging out at her salon-barbershop. There was a kind of uncle-cousin of ours, Blackie Buck, that owned it, and she cut hair. They’re all just hanging out and I would get lost and go sneak around in the back. It always smelled like perm, because it was the Eighties. That’s why my mom had to quit cutting hair, because her hands started getting damaged from perm chemicals. But for a while, she was the woman that cut everyone’s hair in town. In high school, all the football players would come every Friday and get haircuts from her. All the cheerleaders and the girls would come and get perms from her. And so you meet a lot of people naturally that way.
And then my dad taught martial arts. Since I was four years old, I’ve fought competitively. That was interesting, because race doesn’t really play into a hair salon or a martial arts school. I just think back on what life was like pre-meth in my hometown. It was really kind of an idyllic town. It was really awesome. I really loved growing up there. I mean, we got into trouble, especially once we started drinking and partying in high school. It got dark and then meth sort of came into rural America, and also a prison moved into Holdenville, which I think also fucks things up. But storytelling was always there. I always tell stories, and it’s kind of how I talk. I just had a lot of really good examples all around me and a lot of stories all the time.
TG: And then you’ve talked about being influenced by—as we were saying—all the things coming from outside the community, from Ice Cube’s movie Friday to S. E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders.
SH: The Outsiders was really big for me when I was a kid. And I don’t know if S. E. Hinton likes me. Don’t meet your heroes! But one time, we asked her if we could do an adaptation of The Outsiders on Reservation Dogs, and I think she got really mad! But anyway, yeah, I love The Outsiders. Growing up, I read the book and watched the movie. And that movie, I just felt like I was in it—Van Morrison and “Gloria,” playing throughout the whole movie. I still watch it. And I showed my kids The Outsiders the other day. It’s still so good to me. I love Rumble Fish, too. But I didn’t catch Rumble Fish until later. The Outsiders was big.
Movies for me were always big. My dad’s a big movie guy, and we would watch everything together. My dad had a friend who worked at a cable company and gave us free cable boxes and so we got everything at the time. And it was the era of Goonies, The Lost Boys, Platoon, Howard the Duck. And I watched Porky’s way too young. We watched those movies until we knew them by heart and then we also got into the show called Tour of Duty. And we knew that by heart. It was crazy, like me, my dad could quote movies front to back to you. I was not really censored about what I could or couldn’t watch.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller was big for me. I was a giant Michael Jackson fan. I had a glove with sequins on it that my aunt made, and I had a perm. I had it all. And when Thriller came out and The Making of Thriller was on VHS, I watched it and was fascinated by it. It was the first behind-the-scenes I had ever seen. And it was the first time I realized, oh, they make all this stuff. You get to see how they make masks, the makeup, choreography, and I was pretty blown away by that. And that gave me this idea that there are people who make this stuff. I still didn’t think I could do it, or would have the opportunity to do it, but it did show me that it’s not just magically there, that there are people behind the scenes creating everything.
TG: When did you start to get the idea that this is something that you wanted to do yourself?
SH: Not until college. I always wanted to be a painter and an artist. I was the kid that drew and anytime someone needed someone to draw something they would come get me. I went to the University of Oklahoma for painting. We had a lot of fun in art school. After my freshman year, I didn’t make the 3.0 grade point average that I needed. And so I had to go on academic probation. I switched majors to film, because it only required a 2.5 GPA. I took Intro to Film and Video Studies with Misha Nedeljkovich. And this is also around the time when independent films were kind of big in the late ’90s. I was like… I think I could do that. And that’s when I fell in love with it.
Misha had this way of teaching. His love for cinema was very infectious. He could break down a film, and he showed me that filmmaking is a language. It is not just randomly putting the camera somewhere. And once I got into that, and once I had all of these movies and could go back and start watching all of this film history, I fell in love with it. That’s when I switched and never looked back. I just did it. I just kept doing it. I’d tell people at that time, “I’m gonna make a film.” And I just never quit, for better or worse. I was like, I’m gonna keep making this stuff, if it kills me.
TG: That love for filmmaking and for learning that language—it’s so present in Reservation Dogs, including some of the very things that you mentioned, references to Goonies, Willow, Platoon.
SH: We were talking earlier about influences coming from outside. That is how we live in a small town. You’re trying to act like you’re not there—and kids live through these references. I wanted to try to write in a way that we could move through genre with each episode, but also in a way that shows that a lot of their influences are coming from the outside and pop culture.
TG: So in that context, I have to ask about William Knifeman, played by comedian and activist Dallas Goldtooth. I know Dallas a little bit from my days covering the Keystone XL fight. Tell me about the evolution of this character.
SH: I feel like I’ve been a part of these movements. I’ve been a part of This Land—Tulsa kind of reframing itself. And then, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto was another big thing. We all kind of came of age there—Taika Waititi and a lot of some of the filmmakers that directed my show. And then, there’s the 1491s, a comedy group that we started. We were doing videos, just funny Native humor. And it got popular in Indian Country, and we started doing a live show and traveling with it. It really sustained us for, like, a decade. I learned how to shoot comedy, and we learned how to make it work on stage. And one of the things we learned is white people have a hard time laughing when it’s Indians on stage, trying to make them laugh. I think there’s guilt baked in. And they don’t know how to feel confronting some of that guilt. They don’t want to be making fun of us. We needed to give white audiences permission to laugh.
So in all of our shows, we would come out, and we would basically say, look, it’s okay to laugh. And we have a play too with a narrator, who literally just says it in the opening: white people, it’s okay to laugh. And that’s what William Knifeman is. He’s the character that shows non-Natives what Native humor is, because he does it outlandishly. All at once, he makes fun of history and how we’ve been depicted but also acknowledges that some of that’s real. But also, he’s something familiar to a non-Native audience—like, I’ve never seen Indians in slides and gym shorts, but, I recognize this. He welcomes you in but kind of flips everything on its head.
“I think people are really looking for specificity and worlds they haven’t seen. You also have to make it relatable to everyone.”
