“Write for Your Communities, Don’t Write for the White Man”: Inside the Sundance Native Lab

Santa Fe has retained the traces of the people who lived there first. The New Mexico capital’s world-famous contemporary art galleries are housed within Pueblo-style buildings adorned with thick ristras of chiles (a plant indigenous to the Americas). Downtown alongside the Plaza, the block-long arcade at the Palace of the Governors is exclusively reserved for Native artisans and craftspeople to sell their wares. And over in the Railyard Arts District, the Hotel Santa Fe — majority-owned by the Picuris Pueblo tribe — plays host to the Sundance Institute’s Native Lab, the filmmaking program through which nearly every Indigenous creative of note working in Hollywood has passed since it was founded.

This year’s cohort of four fellows and two artists in residence convened with the Sundance Indigenous Program team and four industry advisors in the city in early May for a week of script readings, one-on-one sessions and more informal breaking of the bread. Through it all, one point of discussion continuously emerged: Who are you writing for? It’s a question that could arise in any screenwriting course or workshop, but it’s particularly urgent among Indigenous communities around the world, especially at a time when there have never been more (read: a nonzero number of) Native-led projects crossing over into the pop culture mainstream. Put another way: How should Indigenous artists today navigate an industry with unprecedented opportunity and appetite for their stories, while preserving their narrative sovereignty?

For all the relative gains, Hollywood’s most high-profile depictions of Indigenous people are still largely controlled by white creatives and center white characters, from Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon to Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone franchise to Kevin Costner’s Horizon. “Some of the struggles that come from the spotlight in Hollywood on Indigenous communities right now is we’re often asked to be cultural consultants when we actually have so much more to offer creatively as storytellers,” says Lab fellow Charine Pilar Gonzales.

“There’s a specific relationship all of our people have had with film — like, not particularly great — but it’s gotten a lot better, and it’s because people have been telling their own stories,” says Indigenous Program director Adam Piron of recent highlights like FX’s Emmy-nominated Reservation Dogs, Marvel’s Echo, Peacock’s Rutherford Falls and AMC’s Dark Winds. Key creatives from all four shows have Sundance ties. Dark Winds executive producer Chris Eyre’s landmark 1998 film Smoke Signals (the first mainstream feature created by Native Americans) was workshopped at the Institute’s filmmaking labs before winning the festival’s Audience Award. Reservation Dogs creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi have both served as Native Lab advisors (Harjo was the inaugural fellow in the lab’s 2003 pilot program, while Waititi’s breakout short Two Cars, One Night was selected for the festival’s Native Forum program a year later). Echo director Sydney Freeland and Rutherford Falls writer and actor Jana Schmieding are both alumnae fellows of the Native Lab.

The Lab’s focus in recent years on narrative features and pilot scripts (as opposed to previous incarnations of the Lab, which encompassed less commercial projects like shorts and nonfiction) is a reflection of the real possibilities now available to Native creatives, explains Piron. “It was responding to the industry to a certain extent but not in a reactive way,” he says. “It’s always been about meeting artists where they are. What are the spaces that they’re looking to go into, and trying to be a catalyst for that.”

For Gonzales, the goal is television. The Tewa filmmaker, who grew up in Santa Fe and nearby San Ildefonso Pueblo, is the only 2024 fellow with an episodic project (NDN Time, about a Tewa college student who uses her newly discovered powers to protect her homeland from nuclear threat). “I’d been feeling so lost about it being too commercial or being pushed into that side of things,” she says, “and one thing that’s very different about Sundance is they allow us to be ourselves, which I don’t think is always what we get in commercial spaces. There were pieces of my script that I had denied myself in order to fit in, and now I feel like I’m taking so much power back into my writing and taking control again.”

As a local daughter, Gonzales adds that having the program take place on her homelands — her saya (grandmother) opened the Lab with a Tewa blessing — was especially empowering. Yet, the event also felt like something of a homecoming for far-flung fellow Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan, who is descended from the Ifugao and Visayan peoples in the Philippines. “All the labs do this exorcism within the writers, where we draw from something deeper and channel it into their characters, but what is special here is I’m surrounded with other Native artists,” says the filmmaker, who has completed residencies and intensives hosted by the Cannes, Berlin and Locarno film festivals. “The safe space of being in a collective who could understand what you’re going through culturally, spiritually and personally makes this quite a special experience.”

Adds fellow Lindsay McIntyre, who is of partial Inuit descent, “I’ve been in other programs where there’s really great critique about structure and other things, but I find myself conflicted about how much of the Inuit worldview I need to explain for people, or how much do I just pull out because it’s going to make people uncomfortable.” The Native Lab’s stance couldn’t be clearer: “Write for your communities, don’t write for the white man,” program coordinator Katie Arthurs told the cohort. “They can figure it out — they have enough stuff!”

Even the white men among the advisors agree. “Coming here as a non-Indigenous person, I’ve been very sensitive about making sure that the feedback I’m giving isn’t impeding anyone’s voice and is just serving to push it along, but also is acknowledging the realities of our industry and being able to make stuff,” says filmmaker Patrick Brice (director of 2014’s Creep), serving as a Native Lab advisor for the second time. “The work here is personal, but it’s also inherently political, and those two things can’t be divorced from each other.”

With show business contracting just as Native artists are finally breaking through on and off screen — just see 2024’s historic class of Emmy nominees — the stakes seemingly couldn’t be higher for Indigenous emerging creatives. “The industry is so chaotic right now, and we asked Adam, ‘How much of that reality do you want to bring up here?’” says advisor Kishori Rajan, who is Tessa Thompson’s producing partner. “He was like, ‘You don’t need to bring it.’ So I found this week really refreshing where we could go back to what is a good story, character. The point of the Lab is literally to remind them to keep going. The only solution is to keep making stuff.”

The cohort will reunite in person at the 2025 Sundance festival — still in Utah for now — before officially wrapping up next May. But the bonds formed do not dissolve, according to Tai Leclaire, a 2022 Fellow turned 2024 advisor who, like Piron, is Mohawk. “This program catapulted so many of the career opportunities I had after it,” says the filmmaker and actor, who was commissioned by Warner Bros. to direct a short-film adaptation of its classic The Prince and the Pauper for the studio’s 100th anniversary. “Yes, a part of it was the prestige of Sundance, but it was more because you were able to build your community. Being Indigenous, we inject so much of our culture into our pieces, and I think this group understands that it’s not what my culture can do for me, it’s what I can do for my culture.”

And just as the relationships will continue, so too will Indigenous influence on the industry, Piron believes. “People have brought up whether [the current peak of Native-created content] is a wave. A wave implies that it crashes at some point,” he says. “I try to think of it more like a tide — this idea that this thing is to some extent changing the larger ecosystem. It’s an Indigenous philosophy: You’re constantly playing the long game. If you look at our communities and all we’ve been through, we’ve been built to last.”