Elevating Montana’s Native voices and experiences

Well, it only took a little more than 150 years, but it seems that Native voices in Montana are finally reaching the national stage.

With Lily Gladstone’s Golden Globe nomination for best actress a few weeks ago for her stunning performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Montana has its first Native American nominee for a major award in the film industry, and it’s about damn time. 

Gladstone has been quietly developing steam as someone to watch ever since she was nominated for several smaller awards, winning a few, for her equally impressive performance in “Certain Women” in 2016. And of course, because the film industry is what it is, it took the influence of an old white guy to bring her the attention she deserves. But kudos to Martin Scorsese for casting her in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” And also kudos for him for telling a story that doesn’t end up somehow glorifying the white agenda, as the horrible “Dances With Wolves” did a few decades ago.

I despised that film when it came out, and I recently watched it again because I couldn’t remember exactly what it was that I didn’t like about it. And I hated it even more when I realized that the entire storyline is focused on making sure Kevin Costner’s character gets what he wants. The entire tribe drops everything to make sure he achieves his objective. It’s just the kind of revisionist history that perpetuates the myths that the white guys were generally the heroes.

It would be nice to see Lily Gladstone’s accomplishment as an impetus to bring more attention from the publishing and film industry to the fabulous writers we have working today. For too long, the publishing industry has thrown a bone to a few token Native writers as the voice of their people, and as much as I admire the works of Louise Erdrich (she’s actually my favorite living novelist) and Sherman Alexie, it’s been kind of refreshing to see Alexie’s exile open the door for more Native voices.

In Montana alone, we have the immensely gifted Debra Magpie Earling, whose first novel, “Perma Red,” published in 2000, garnered much attention and praise. Her most recent novel, “The Lost Journals of Sacagawea,” is again gaining rave reviews. Montana also saw the recent publication of a young-adult novel co-written by Mandy Smoker Broaddus, who did an incredible job as the director of the Indian Education Program in Montana for many years before moving on to a similar position for the entire Pacific Northwest. Broaddus, who is also an award-winning poet and a member of both the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes, and her friend Natalie Petersee won the High Plains Book Award for “Thunderous.” 

We also saw the publication of a terrific memoir by someone I graduated from high school with at Billings West High in 1976. Susan Devan Harness published “Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption” in 2020, and poet Heather Cahoon of Missoula, who has published several collections.

Montana can also lay partial claim to one of the writers for the critically acclaimed series “Reservation Dogs,” the first series ever created, written and produced by an entirely native team. Migizi Pensoneau, a member of the Ponca and Ojibwe tribes, has been part of the writing team, and although Pensoneau was born in Minnesota, he lived for a time in Montana while he was developing the successful comedy troupe, The 1491s. 

We also have rising stars like Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, born and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, who has recently published several stories in the New Yorker, and Adria Jawort, who has been producing quality journalism for years for several publications, and has recently been writing about their experience as a trans writer in Montana.

And perhaps most impressively, Montana has produced a brother/sister team of filmmakers, Ivan and Ivy MacDonald, who produced the powerful two-part documentary “Murder in Big Horn,” about the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples. Ivan and Ivy worked on this documentary for years, scrambling to find funding wherever they could, and the fact that they got it made at all was a testament to their persistence about getting the word out about this important issue. 

Ideally, this momentum will continue and eventually carry into the world of television and film, so that we don’t have to just keep going back and watching “Smoke Signals” over and over again. As much as I love that film, it’s shockingly 25 years old now, and it’s about time we had some more representation from our Indigenous population. 

Russell Rowland is the author of five novels, as well as “Fifty-Six Counties: A Montana Journey.” He also hosts a radio show called “56 Counties” on Yellowstone Public Radio. This column was first published by Daily Montanan.