Bear Grease - Ep. 247: Sterlin Harjo - Seminole Filmmaker

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, Clay Newcomb invites you to meet Sterlin Harjo, a Muscogee Creek and Seminole Filmmaker who co-created the award-winning show "Reservations Dogs."  His ability to convey the cultural nuance of what it means to be native to a wider audience is what has made him successful.  Listen along as Sterlin tells the story of his life: growing up, hunting, and filmmaking, all with the unique perspective, challenges, and benefits of being an Oklahoma-born Native American.   If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. I didn't know we were sneaking. I just thought we're hanging. And so we would go over there and we would hunt. I didn't know right at first, but at some point I realized it wasn't our land.

I was like, who's land is he? My dad, like some Texas ranchers, but they're never here. We're going to hunt it. So we would go over there and we'd hunt it. On this episode, we're traveling to the big city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet its most famous filmmaker, a member of the Muskogee Creek and Seminole-Naker. Sterling Harjo. He's 44 years old, a lifelong resident of Oklahoma,

and has risen to the top tier of his craft, taking an unconventional path. After taking a big swing at the Hollywood filmmaking scene, he ditched it and went home to Oklahoma to make honest movies about his people, and it ended up being the best thing he could have ever done. His work has recently risen to national prominence, receiving multiple awards, even nominated for an Emmy.

and it seems there's only more to come. I'd say he's a unique guest for Bear Greece. And say you might, how does this fancy filmmaker have anything to do with gritty, rural Americano living? Well, you're about to find out. Sterling and his people fit right in here. And this story is replete with deer hunting, beauty salons, taekwondo, trespassing, leasing from rich dudes, and Sterling's very serious problem with owls. and cracking into the film industry.

I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. And hey, deer season's coming up, and if you're looking for the best all-around deer call, check out the Akron Pro that's spelled A-K-E-R-N, spelled the right way, Acron Pro from Phelps. It's the industry's only inhale, exhale, grunt, and bleak call. Me and Jason Phelps and the team worked together, built this call, It's my favorite call, and it's just in time for hunting season on the Phelps website.

I didn't know making films would be possible. I didn't know it was a job. But I was always interested in. I remember when Michael Jackson's thriller came out on the making of thriller, I was fascinated. I was just like, what? Like, there's makeup artists that turned them into a werewolf, and all of that. You know, I was really fascinated with the behind the scenes.

And, but I never thought I could do it. It was like, I'm from Oklahoma. I'm an Indian from Oklahoma, you know? How am I going to make movies? Like, you got to be in Hollywood or something. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we experience.

floor. I've found myself on the fourth floor of an office building in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, and on the door, it says, Screaming Eagle Media. This is Sterling Harjo's office. It's on the top floor with access to the roof, with lots of big windows, overlooking the city, couches, the kitchen. Sterling thinks it used to belong to an oil company in the 70s, and they entertained people up here. There's a guitar propped up in the corner. and on the walls are posters of the show Reservation Dogs with varying images of four sharply dressed teenagers. I'd say they're native.

Sterland's a stout fella. I'd say he's a touch taller than me, and he's wearing a cool felt hat with a band of Indian beadwork. His shirt looks like Hawaiian print, but when you look closely, it's got TPs and drums, Indians riding horses, and tomahawks in the pattern.

Kind of jealous of it. His arms are covered in tattoos And upon closer inspection One is of a Black Panther I told you he'd fit in here Wait till you hear about the owls But what stands out to me most about Sterling Is what a nice and inviting guy he is

He's ordered the best barbecue in Tulsa That'll be here in just a little bit I'm learning that when you go to Oklahoma They want to break bread with you But for now, I'm pretty much Going to let Sterling tell us His life story Yeah, my name is Sterling Harjo. I am Muskogee Creek and Seminole and also Italian and Scottish and German and other things. But I was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma. And I grew up, Holdenville's in Hughes County, it's on the Muskogee Creek and Seminole Nation line. And so a lot of us that are native down there are both Seminole and Creek, which is like, you know, it's a pretty good deal because the, the,

The two tribes are very intertwined and to the point where we speak the same language. The Muscogee Creeks were a Confederacy. I always heard that the Muscogee language was a trade language. And so all of the different bands and groups that made up the Muscogee Creek Nation, they all had like a shared trade language. The customs and the way of life is very similar. And so that's where I grew up. I now live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm a filmmaker.

I created the show Reservation Dogs. independent filmmaker before that, sort of just grinding, making no-budget movies, with an insatiable sort of need to tell the truth and stories about who we are as native people and what I saw growing up, which led me to making the show Reservation Dogs. And it's been a very successful show, and we were just nominated for our first Emmys. Yeah, it's been a crazy couple of times. years my life sort of turned upside down. Very happy that I still live here in Tulsa and I'm able to sort of be close to my family and friends. That's who I am. Yeah, I grew up at Holdenville. Holdenville was, you know, it was a cool place. I have nothing but like the best memories from growing up at

Holdenville. I mean, rural Oklahoma. But yeah, it was just sort of an idealic place to grow up. I mean, it was so diverse. I had white friends, black friends, native friends. We all got along. Everybody knew each other's grandma. It was just like I would never pick another place to grow up. You sort of get those values of being from a rural area, I think. You know, if the zombie apocalypse happened today, I wouldn't hang out in Tulsa.

I would go to my hometown, you know, where somebody could, like, grow their food and ring a chicken's neck. You know, like, that's where I'd go. I had it best of both worlds where I had. I'm just giant native family. And then I had my white grandma, who was a smaller family, but like both sides were the best storytellers ever. You know, we come from like people that were poor. And from a young age, though, I always wanted to be an artist. And my dad and my uncle taught me how to draw.

And I remember I won a competition for drawing at the first National Bank, and I won $10. and I thought I was rich. And it was about pollution. And I drew this lake with all these fish and animals, you know, dying. And I went down and I got a picture. My picture is like on the cover of the Holdenville newspaper. From the very beginning of my memories, that's what I knew I wanted to do. What I didn't know is I was also really getting into movies the whole time.

I just didn't know it was possible to make movies. And so one thing that's interesting, grandma on my mom's side, who's my native grandma. And then my grandpa on my other side was native and both full-blood native, which made my parents half, which two halves end up together make me, which I'm half. And so my native grandma, Johnny May was her name, Johnny May Kalinich. There was a thing called the Relocation Act. And back in the day, and it was sort of this way of like, hey, Indians, come work in the city. You'll get a good job, you know, and be able to pay your family. I kind of think it was more to, hey, Indians, get away from your community, assimilate into America, because there was such a threat

to America, the community, community aspect of our lives. And there was like so many government policies that were in direct assault of that community, the Dawes Act, you know, we'll give you 180 acres of individual land, you can do whatever you want with it. Well, in a couple of years, somebody's going to come and try to swindle you out of it as well. If you look at like Killers of the Flower Moon and all of that stuff's connected. But really it was to break up the fact that all the tribes had communal living. There was no homelessness. There was no nobody gone hungry. We worked together to feed each other. Something about that offended, I think, the U.S. government. There was a lot of policy towards Native Americans to disrupt that.

My grandma and then went to Chicago to work in factories. Luckily, they all came back home, but not before my grandma fell in love with an Italian man named Rock Kalinich. The word George was his name, but he went by Rock. And they fell in love, had my uncle and my mom in Chicago. And then they all, aunts and uncles, everybody moved back home to rural Oklahoma. There's a giant native community in Chicago still. But down in rural Oklahoma now, there is a gang and ends with the last name Kalinich. So, you know, and then my dad's Harjo.

Harjo is a, from a Muscoa word. The original word is Hajo, which means crazy in battle. Crazy for short. So that's what my last name means. And so I grew up in this pretty fascinating place. My mom was a hairdresser. She permed every's the 80s. She permed every cheerleader's hair.

She gave every football player a haircut before the Friday night game. And she ended up having to quit because she was allergic to perm chemicals and it messed her hands up. But I grew up kind of in this salon, this barbershop. And I just kind of grew up with the community coming through this place. My dad was a construction worker but also taught martial arts in my town. And so he became a taekwondo instructor when I was four years old. I remember the first lessons were taught in a basement of church. And I fought competitively with my dad who just retired the school,

martial arts last year. And my dad's kind of like, if my dad could choose his way of life, he'd be in the middle of the woods without a road, as long as he had cable, you know, like come outside and hunt, whatever, and then come back and watch football or whatever. And my dad was kind of a hippie. You know, natives were like the best hippie. Like a southern hippie, though, like, I think southern hippies are very different from California hippies, you know, like, southern hippies will still, like, eat a squirrel, you know, but like, wore bell bottoms, you know,

and my dad had long hair because he was a hippie, and he was native, and he would go to school, and you couldn't have long hair, so my dad would wear a wig. No, it would be late 60s in Holdenville, and my dad would wear a wig to school,

and one of the principals was like on the hunt for my dad for growing his hair out too long, and one day he yanked the wig off my dad, and my dad's hair comes out. And my dad quit school. He was a sophomore, and he quit school. And he was kind of a football star, and he quit.

And he's always, I think he always regretted that, you know. My mom is a very outgoing person who is like, she taught me what it means to be a part of a community. She is a person that no matter what, if somebody died, even if they weren't our family, she was taking food to them. My mom, for me, really represents that communal aspect of native life where she's always, like, taking. me with her to events and gatherings and feasts and wild onion dinners is a big thing that we have in the spring. She was always taking to me these things. Every time we walked in, she'd say, go shake everybody's hand. I have to go shake everyone's hand in that room. And she'd be like, that's your cousin, that's your cousin, that's your cousin, that's your cousin, that's your cousin, that's your

cousin, that's your distant cousin. You know, it's like, how many cousins do I have? And how am I going to get married? You know, like, and so I'd have to go through it and I'd shake everybody's hand. And I hated it then. But now it's like, it's, I'm so happy because everybody knows me. And it translated into me getting a lot of respect and trust with making movies and stuff. And that's a big reason why I also didn't leave is because when I make these films, I'm telling stories about my people and I'm going to incorporate them into what I'm telling because I want to be real. And I don't think enough people in Hollywood and modern sort of entertainment care about that enough because it's about money. It's not about trying to tell the truth. So,

like, I grew up with pretty fascinating people and community-driven people, but they were very supportive. My parents are still together. I've got two brothers, two sisters, and yeah, it was just a, it was a cool existence. I mean, it felt very much like stand by me, you know, growing up it was like we walked all over town looking for a dead body you know it's like anything interesting that could happen you know last spring clay newcomb and i collaborated with jason phelps at phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts now i'm going to tell you i love mine because it's easy to use i'm not going to go i'm not going to win a turkey calling contest it's just not going to happen but when i run this call i get the sounds that gobblers are looking for

have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers. who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I think growing up in Oklahoma, I don't know. I mean, like, I grew up with my dad was always hunting. I mean, here's the thing. The sort of more conscious conservation came to me later.

When we were young, it was like, this is our land. Well, hunt wherever we want. And what are you talking about? You know, like, we got to report in with you. Like, who are you? You know, like, I think that when I was young, it was like, what fishing hall are we going to sneak into? And me and my cousin were 14 driving my dad's car and, like, dirt roads and, like, we'd go fishing on somebody's land, like, whatever. And then, you know, there's episode, episode six of the first season where it's just a father and daughter hunting.

That's all it is. And that's kind of was the north star of my first season was, I want to be able to get the audience to where I can just film a father and daughter in the woods. Here's this short clip from reservation dogs. A father and his teenage daughter are dressed in camo and hunter's orange. Their faces are painted and both have a rifle in their hand. In this scene, the daughter realizes that they don't own the land that they're hunting on. Where'd you get the picture? For a trailcombe.

I don't own a trail cam. What? What do you mean? Whose is it then? It's probably the owner, son. The owners? Yep. Don't we own this line?

No. We're Indian. We don't own land. The father then explains to the girl that this land used to be theirs, but her great-grandfather had sold it. She asked if they'll ever get it back, and the dad basically says, Texas ranchers don't give anything back. She then says that she saw some images of people on the trail camera, and the father tells her that they were probably poachers. And then he pauses for a minute and he goes, well, different poachers than us. And it's a brilliant scene.

And one that Sterling lived, I appreciate his honesty. And it's very much based on me and my dad because we would sneak over, I thought it was our land. We'd sneak over and cross the road, this giant acreage of land across our dirt road. We lived on a hill outside of Holdenville. I didn't know we were sneaking. I just thought we're hanging. And so we would go over there. and we would hunt.

And I didn't know right at first, but at some point I realized it wasn't our land. And I was like, whose land is he? My dad was like some Texas ranchers, but they're never here. We're like, we're going to hunt it. You know, so we would go over there and we'd hunt it. And, you know, my dad even told a story one time he was in a tree.

And he heard these two guys walking by. And this is in that episode. He heard these two guys walking by, and it was the Texas ranchers walking underneath him. My dad's in camera just, you know, watching them walk by. And they're talking about their wives, he said. But they would never show up. And then they sold it to someone.

And this person leveled it. But those woods, to me, were, like, magical. Like, that's where I hunted. That's where I camped. I was always with my dad killing deer. I kill rabbits and stuff, I remember. But I never killed a deer until I was later in high school. And I remember the first time I was skinned a deer myself and field-dressed it and everything.

Just feeling, I always tell people this, I felt the warm. the warmth of the blood. And you know, you have this feeling of, like, sadness a little bit, but also the overriding feeling. I remember in my head saying, I'll do this the rest of my life. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. Like, of anything, this is what I'm supposed to do. And I'll do this the rest of my life.

And I remember when I went off, I was moving away to Oregon. I was dropping my dad off to hunt. And I drove around kind of a section line and came down to this creek where my dad was going to walk in. And I just remember him getting out of. a sand by and me driving on the dirt road in the rear view watching my dad sort of disappear into the woods. And it was just like this place that I grew up, you know. But it was kind of weird being native and having to, because then after that we started leasing land.

And it's like, where is our land? And how do I hunt? It was always like, I'm leasing it from, you know, some white guy with money. And, you know, they're nice. But like, it was just always like, what does this all mean, you know? But I remember, just quick this story, I remember we were leasing land outside of Holdenville. It was kind of sectioned out. This land was kind of sectioned out.

We were, me and my dad were walking. This pickup truck pulls up. It was this guy who was also leasing the land, a white guy. And I remember him just really being suspicious of us. And my dad's the type of guy, he'll talk, you know, hey, yeah, boy, man, we ain't seen nothing down there. It's like just chatting the guy up. And I can feel that he's like things that were not. supposed to be there even though I've paid the lease and I can feel it and I mean the rage in me is

going like you say it's like just please say something you know and I'm just like but I could tell the way he was talking to us like he didn't believe that we were leasing it and he's calling the owner and my dad's like yeah get me call you know my dad's just chatting him up and I'm just over there like oh you know you know like you know and then whenever I've whenever I bought my land outside of town that I hunt on. It was pretty big. I remember we were driving. It was right when I was about to buy it. Had it all went through and I took my dad there. And we were heading out there. I think he thought it was just some land outside of the city. It wasn't going to be good. You know, like, he said, he's like, where's it at? There's woods there? Like, well, you think we can hunt on it? Like,

I'm like, dude, we can't. So we get out there, we go on the side by side. He's just blown away. We're driving away. He's like, oh, my God. He's just like, we're driving away. And he just starts yelling. like at the top of his lungs can I cuss on this? Can you bleep it out? Can I believe? Can I, I, I'll believe it up. Okay.

And he's yelling, we don't need your effing land. We got our own land now. And he was talking about hunt on the land. And it was a big deal. And I just remember like, he was pumped and he was yelling. And, you know,

our whole life we'd never had our own. But we'd always say that. You know, we'd be on somebody else's land. We'd be like, man, I should be cool if we had our own. It wasn't until, you know, Honestly, like watching meteor and the stuff that you do, like, my dad really got into that because it was more like how we hunted as far as like the respect that we gave towards

the hunt, the animal and all of that. Like, I don't know, all the emotions that go with it and the importance of it felt, it just felt real to me. It just felt like the way reservation dogs feels to me about native life, you know, it was real. And, you know, I knew the time that I first got one that I was going to do it, you know. Yeah. But, you know, like, obviously, like watching the shows and stuff, it's like, man, y'all walk a lot, you know. Like, we don't walk that much.

But I'd like to, yeah. Oklahoma was sort of a reservation. I was Indian territory at one time. So it was all Indian land. And eastern Oklahoma, which would have been Holdbill and Tulsa and Talakwell and everything, was at one point going to be a native state. It was lost by one vote, which was obviously crooked. It didn't, you know, they, somebody rigged that. But it was going to be called the state of Sequoia.

And very interesting thing that happened a few years back is Oklahoma versus McGirt, which basically my tribe of Muscogee Creek in a court case, in a criminal court case, they found that it's still reservation land. And so it reinstated the reservation. So you're on the Muskogee Creek reservation right now, literally as we speak, your feet are. And then that opened the door for our. a lot of other eastern Oklahoma tribes. So if you go that way about two miles, you'll be on Cherokee Nation Reservation Land. And then Seminole Nationland is about an hour and a half south. Did you grow up

on the Seminole Reservation or no? I mean, technically, yeah. But it's not a reservation that I think that you would be thinking, which is like a closed reservation. You drive through and it just be like a town. I'm in a town in Oklahoma. You know, I'm a town in the south. But there's a lot of brown people here. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that we, technically a reservation, but because Oklahoma was, I mean, it's just a crazy history. Oklahoma is like the most unique of all the states. It used to be in Territory. And then, you know, you look at all of those, you know, you watch True Grit.

We're going into the territory, you know, hanging Judge Parker. Well, that was all into terror as Oklahoma. It was a place where criminals went because they get away with stuff. And it was, it was lawless because it wasn't the nation of the United States. It was a no man's land. I didn't know making films would be possible. I didn't know it was a job. But I was always interested in. I remember when Michael Jackson's thriller came out of the making of thriller,

I was fascinated. I was just like, what? Like, there's makeup artists that turned them into a werewolf and all of that. You know, I was really fascinated with the behind the scenes.

And, but I never thought I could do it. It was like, I'm from Oklahoma. I'm an Indian from Oklahoma. You know, how am I going to make movies? Like, you got to be, you got to be in Hollywood or something. And I'd been interested in movies. I started watching

independent films. And I was like, maybe I could tell a story back home. And I remember I went to Oregon and I got a letter from my grandma. They didn't know how long I was going to be gone. They thought I was moved away forever. I'd written a story and it was about her and a man that she married that burned himself alive and crazy story. But I gave it to, I wrote this story about it and she read it and kind of realized that was a writer. And when I moved to Oregon, she wrote me a letter and said, Someday you ought to come back home and tell some stories about these Indian churches around here. And that stuck with me. And I started writing a script because of it.

And I wrote my first script and it's awful. But it was just like it kind of gave me the confidence to do this. I started asking friends. I was like, I want to make movies. And my friend lived next door to the head of the film and video studies at the University of Oklahoma. I got a meeting with him, gave him a script, told him I wanted to make movies. movies. He gave it back to me and he said, it's not a formatted ride. I won't read it. And he's like, you should take this class. And so I took this class. It was intro to film and video studies by this

Hungarian teacher filmmaker named Misha Nadelcovic. And I was sold after that. It was just like, he had this infectious way of talking about movies where it was like all of a sudden, it wasn't just pointing a camera randomly at something. It was the camera could tell a story. You use shots to tell a story. Once I realized that, I was sort of hooked. And I got into all of these. He started showing me movies by John Cassavetes or, you know, the French New Wave movies or whatever. I was just like blown away that all of these voices were out there. And I was like, no one's ever told stories about where I'm from and the people that I come from.

No one has. And I saw that as a plus, not a minus, that I have a leg up and that I can tell a story that no one's told before. which is rare. I had my heart set on it after that. I just began writing. And I remember telling my friends, you know, I'm going to make a movie in two years. And I got, right.

And I made it in four. Four years I made a movie, you know. And like, so what happened is I started writing them, this guy named Bird Running Water, who's a Cheyenne Arapaho and Mescalero Apache guy that grew up in Oklahoma, and he graduated from the University of Oklahoma. He was working for the Sundance Institute.

And the Sundance Institute is kind of, they're connected to the festival. festival. But Robert Redford started it as a way to like basically support independent film. Because you can't just look for independent filmmakers in Hollywood. You have to have scouts. So they have basically people that scout in Europe, in South America, in Indian country, you know. And this skybird running water was basically scouting Native American storytellers. He came and spoke about Sundance. I went, heard the talk. And afterwards I said, I really want to make movies. And he was like, well, let's figure it out. I wrote a script, tried to get into the Sundance,

Riders Lab, got rejected. But it was good enough that two years later, he was asking me if I had anything new, I sent in a script called Four Sheets to the Wind. I got accepted, and I went to the Riders Lab, and I left school, went to the Riders Lab, and Director's Lab, and started making my films, you know. And taught myself how to edit, got student loans, bought a camera, computer. My friend had a band. I would make music videos for his band, and I learned how to edit that way and shoot.

And then the Sundance Lab, I had no idea what I was doing, but I just had to pretend and go along with it. You know, I'm meeting some fascinating people, Robert Redford, Ed Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, you know, I'm hanging out with him. All these people that I admired and, you know, were heroes of mine. All of a sudden, they're giving me advice. After that, I went to L.A. to do some meetings. So I was like, you know, because Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, all these filmmakers came out of the last. So I thought, oh man, I'm next. Like, I'm next online. What I didn't know is independent film

and basically crashed at that point. This is post-reservoir dogs, Pulp Fiction, all that. It was like, there was no money for independent film. And I didn't know that. And I go to L.A. and I'm just like, I think I'm in the toast of the town where I'm just like, oh, man, doors are going to be open. I'm going to be making movies now. And I remember going in and just like getting the worst feedback.

Where's been, oh, your script's great. if there was any way that we could get someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman on the poster. You know, it was like an all-Ind movie, you know, and like, I don't know how to do that, you know. Or like people would say like, Indian movies don't sell. Or they'd say like, it's Indian enough or it's too Indian. And so I was like, I'm going to go back home and make movies in Oklahoma. I came home, I got my first film funded here in Tulsa. And I did two movies, a short film called Good Night Irene, and then a movie called,

four sheets and one that I went to the labs for. And I made them so low budget. I didn't, you know, one got paid. I didn't get paid. But they did well enough that they went into the Sundance Film Festival and other places around the world, won some awards, got critical acclaim. And I was like, okay, now's the time.

I'm going to be making movies now, you know, and it's still nothing. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go,

I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut, because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. 2005 around there, and then, you know, nothing would happen a couple years ago by. I got a new idea. I want to make a new movie. I wrote a movie called Barking Water. I think that was 2009.

And got that funded. I mean, these are like $100,000 movies. No one's getting paid. And small crew. And, you know, I'd get some actors together. And the actors are so appreciative because, like, you know, Richard Ray Whitman and Casey Camp Hornick, who are both elites in Barking Water. You know, Richard's like, you know, he's been a lot of movies, but he's always a silhouette

with a gun on a horse, you know. And Casey, you know, she's an older woman now, but whenever we made a Barking Water, she was like, you know, I've been a dead Indian in almost all the tribes but my own. She's, I'm really good looking dead outside of a teepee, you know. And so they had these two roles where they were able to express emotion and be truthful and be human. And that premiered at Sundance and played at the Venice Film Festival in Italy and all these things. And it was a very low budget again. I didn't make money. But at one point I worked for an organization here called This Land Press.

And it was Longform Magazine. And I did documentaries for them, short documentaries. So I just kind of constantly was shooting. What I really loved about that is to make money to do with doing these short documentaries is I learned how to be a better film. because doing documentaries, you got to walk in a room. It's like, I'm shooting this scene. I got to know where the camera goes like that, you know. I got to be able to pull a performance out of you, and I don't know you.

You know, I was like, so that all helped in training me kind of become the filmmaker that I am. And I just kept doing it, man. And then like, I did this land. I did all these documentaries for this land. They're all online. They're short documentaries. I'm very proud of all that work that I did.

It was telling stories and changing a community that was right here where I'm at, locally. This land also produced the documentary this may be the last time, which is about songs, and it's about my family and things like that. And, you know, there was a point where I was going to quit. There was a point where I wanted to start a nonprofit that was going to kind of teach native youth how to hunt wild game again. And also a food exchange where we get elders, like a processing plant and then you give the meat to elders and also kind of reintroduce wild game into their diet and teach them how to cook it again. It was this idea that I had that I was like, filmmaking is not paying the bills. I got to do something else. And this would be the second thing

I'd want them to do. So, and I was really inspired. I was doing research for a documentary and my friends up in the Northeast. There's a lot of organizations like that with the Northeastern tribes where, you know, kind of a salmon exchange where they would reintegrate salmon fishing back into their communities, you know, through colonization and whatever, you get stripped away from traditional practice and modernization and whatever, you know, your natural way of providing for your family gets disrupted, obviously. And so it's like, you know, they were doing things with reintroducing salmon fishing and cooking back into the community. So I was like very inspired by that. I was like, I'm going to do that back home. And then things changed. And I'd always gamble that

they would change, I just like, I'm going to make movies in Oklahoma. And I think at some point, they'll want to make native stuff at some point. And then what changed was streaming. And all of a sudden, you didn't have to have Tom Cruise on your poster to fund your stuff. Like, TV became this thing where you don't have to have name actors. No one knows who they are and it's okay. Like, it's kind of like benefits the show a little bit. And all of a sudden, I started getting work and TV. And I never thought I'd make TV, but like I started getting work in TV and I was like, oh, man. And then like I would go into a meeting and they'd be like, wow, you've done all of these films. Like you're so experienced.

Where have you been? I've been here, man. Like, where have you been? And so I don't know. Like I saw it changing. I felt it changing. And then my friend who's Maori from the indigenous people of New Zealand, Taiko Waititi, who basically become, you know, we're good friends.

We met in festivals with our films. We would show films together at Indigenous. festivals throughout the, because there's also the indigenous circuit where we kind of hang out. And then we find ourselves at a big festival and you automatically find the indigenous crowd. And you're like, I'm hanging out with y'all. You know, so me and Tyco became really good friends. And then he became kind of a superstar in front of me. Like, you know, what we do in the shadows and Thor, Ragnarok and, you know, people recognize

him. You can't walk down the street all of a sudden with him. You know, I saw a lot of people want things from him. With that fame comes that. And so I never wanted him to feel that way. with me. So I was very much always like, we're just friends. I'll talk to you about life. You know, and one day he said, you know, I have an overall deal at FX. If you have any ideas, like I need to pitch them shows. If you have any ideas, let me know. And he and I had been reading

each other's work for a long time. So, and very similar humor and all of that. And so I was like, what if we took your script, I talked about a specific script, his and a script that I had. I was what if we took those two and combined them and made a show? And we came up with the idea for reservation dogs that night. And then basically he opened the door for me to FX, got a show. And he was like, I'll see ya, buddy. Hope you do. Hope you make it.

Hope you make it good. And obviously I owed a lot to him and felt like I didn't want to disappoint my friend who had put his, you know, walked me in and kind of helped open a door for me. And so I went and made the show and it did well. And, yeah. I mean, it was a long story of how I became a filmmaker. I don't tell stories in a way that excludes people. I grew up from a bunch of different people

that ended up in this continent in a bunch of different ways from many different cultures. I happen to be a part of a very vibrant culture that sort of took over the essence of my life because I was born into it. And being native is really, It's big and it's, I would not choose to be anything else. But I grew up in rural Oklahoma where there were a lot of people

from a lot of different backgrounds and my family from a lot of different backgrounds. And I found a way to talk to everybody. And I really enjoy people that don't come from where I come from or know everything about me or have the same feelings and politics and whatever is me. I think that I'm a more healthy, well-rounded person when I have a bunch of people from different places coming in at once. And for me, telling stories is my way of kind of pulling that together and creating community that I grew up in. And I feel like I miss the community that I grew up in, in the town that I grew up in. And I'm constantly creating that.

And you can't be divisive and create that. For me, it was not a divisive place. It was a very welcoming place. So when I tell stories, I want to invite people in. And that means also educating and teaching about where I'm from and who I am. There's some things that I wouldn't teach about, you know, like some of our ceremonial stuff I wouldn't talk about and show because it's not meant to be shown. But people trust me and native people trust me here. And I like the cultural exchange of teaching other people and telling stories from where I'm.

problem. If I was telling stories just for the people that I grew up with, that'd be pretty boring to me. Like, I'm trying to tell stories about who we are to people that might have a different idea of who we are and trying to tell the truth about who we are a little bit more. And with that, for me, I find the best way is to be open and to be inviting and have some sort of cultural exchange with people. And through that, I think that I think the world would be better if we all did operated more like that you know and that's why i also was a fan of this podcast and that's why i i recognize you telling the story of tecumsa and i don't have to agree with everything you say or whatever like the fact that you put it on a podcast that caters towards

usually i'm sure most of your fans are white and outdoors people and i think there's been a lot of division between the outdoor world and native people, and I think that there's a lot more similarities than we think. And so I think putting those stories, these stories on your podcast, is exactly what I do by showing an owl with blurred out eyes, showing and telling you about my culture and trying to share that. Just so there's more understanding between all of us, I think. In Reservation Dogs, there's a viral scene where Sterling blurred out the eyes of an owl that was in a tree. There's really no explanation given in the show of why he did this, but it's very much an inside cultural joke and all the native people knew exactly what it

meant. Ows are bad news to almost all North American Indian tribes, and Sterling was making light of it. Again, it was brilliant. I asked him to expound on his doctrine on owls, which as you all know, was a beast that's close to my heart. I really hope this doesn't mean that we can't be friends. You grow up with a, especially in my tribes, we grew up with a healthy fear of owls. I mean, really, I was my buddy, Jacob Tovar, who's a musician here in town. He was at my house the other day. We were outside, sitting on the deck, and all of a sudden I heard an owl.

And, you know, one's fine. But then I heard two. They were talking to each other. my backyard. Then there was three or four. And I'm freaking out at this point. I'm like, and Jacob's cracking up. Jacob's cracking out. He's like, are you, he's like, no, it's not Al's first. You know, it's like, dude, I'm going in. Like, I'm going inside. And like, he thought it was the funniest thing just because he knows, he's grew up around enough in that he knows how we feel. But he's also like, it's just an owl. And I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm going

in, you know. But we grew up like, especially in my tribe, there's a couple of things. It was a messenger of death, and it was telling you somebody's going to die. Also, we have a, sort of our biggest boogeyman is a Stiginney. And that is a shapeshifter, a person that could turn themselves into an owl and get up to no good. You know, there's... Sounds terrible. So, so that is like our, one of our biggest sort of, that is, the boogeyman for us. It's like watch out for Stegennies, you know. And so nothing good is happening when you hear it out. It's either, you know, someone's going to die or someone has shape shifted into one and they're coming for you. You know, either way, you're screwed. I guess it didn't,

it didn't make it into the Native American tribes that the barred out is one of the greatest turkey shop gobbles of all times. That's true. It is. But yeah, exactly. See, that even freaks me out. But, you know, it's like, there's a reverence and a respect for the animal, you know, where it's like, you know, a lot of people say that it's a messenger of change, not just death, but my dad's only memory of my grandpa who died when he was five is him shoeing an owl out of a tree, you know. I've been hiking with a friend and an owl starts calling at us, and it feels like it's kind of falling us. We're both like, got to get a little. We're both like, He's Alaska native, but same.

I mean, they're up there. We're down here. They had the same views. And so we're hiking out of there going, we're going to get out of here. And all this could be coincidence. But, you know, it's like how you grow up, you choose to believe what, you know? We're a quarter mile down the road once we got to the car and he got a phone call. And it's like your cousin that grew up like his brother was killed.

And so it's like, you see stuff enough or maybe if we had the same feeling about a Robin, it also would connect in ways that I'm saying the owl does, but I'm saying the owl connects in ways that in my life that has happened. So if I hear four talking to each other in my backyard, I'm going to go inside. Yeah, so we put an owl, there was an owl outside of an Uncle Brownie's house hanging there. As a joke, for the natives, it blurred the eyes out, which I just thought was hilarious and like a good visual joke, you know.

But also, like, what I didn't realize is how many non-natives would be really curious about what that meant. It's one of the biggest questions that I get is, like, what was it with the blurred eyes on the out? You know, and then, like, I've seen it on Facebook and different chat things where someone will ask, and the native people on there will be very patient sort of describe why, you know?

It's kind of a beautiful exchange of, like, culture. And it's kind of the best thing about the show is, like, it's a welcoming show. people are curious about things, you know. It doesn't feel like it's talking down to anyone. I had originally written in there that it was a taxidermidow. But my friend that directed it is Navajo. Well, Navajo's can even be more superstitious, you know. And he's like, there's no taxidermin owl. Like, we're going to get a porcelain owl. So, you know, it's not a taxidermin owl. It's just like a, it's a porcelain or something. You know, it's a plastic, I think. Yeah, yeah.

What's the future going to be like for you? There's some stuff that I want to make. I'm working on this Jim Thorpe project. I have this new show with Ethan Hawk that I'm doing. It takes place in Tulsa. I'm trying to build more of an industry here as part of what I want to do. I want to bring education in for film as well. I have a thing called the Tulsa Film Collective that we show films and bring artists in and filmmakers.

If I'm doing an animated movie that's actually down in Florida Seminole, I just, you know, kind of want to, I'm raising my kids here, you know, and it's like I, I want to make the place better. And I want to make native people more visible in the city. I remember when I first came to Tulsa, I have a film called Miko, and it's about a homeless community in natives in Tulsa. Because when I first got here, that's the only place, I remember like I was missing home. The only place I could find native people faces was in the streets. And I made this movie about that. fictionalized it, but it's changed a lot since then. I think that Tulsa's taken more pride in,

you know, that side of things. And I hope to kind of be a part of more of that, you know. I hope you've enjoyed hearing from Sterling as much as I did. He has an unassuming and honest way of communicating that's unique and draws you into the circle. I think what he's doing for his community and for people outside of his community is important. This is actually just the beginning of a focus we're going to have on the Seminole people and specifically a leader in Sterling's background, the famed Floridian Seminole Osceola. It's a story of how he and his people put up the most difficult military resistance to America in history and how they never lost and remain what they call unconquered. It's a wild story that I know you'll

enjoy it. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. I look forward to talking to everyone on the render next week, and don't forget about that Akron, Akron, Pro Inhal, Inhale, Exhale, grunt call by Phelps. Thank you so much for listening to Bear Grease, and my commercial fishing on assignment undercover agent Brent Reeves, this country life podcast. We really put our heart and soul into all this. We thank you guys for listening. Keep the wild places wild. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a pool of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors,

where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets bare. under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person.

He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.