Erica Tremblay’s eyes narrowed as she motioned toward an electric-blue feather headdress sprouting from the wall. “That was a Plains Indian thing,” she said. “Those aren’t from us.” The “us” meant her people, the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, whose ancestral lands stretched across New York and Canada before their forced relocation to Oklahoma. “But in the ’70s,” she added, “my relatives were rocking those.” Here at Native American World, an eclectic gift shop in Venice Beach, California, she then gestured to a glass counter spattered with turquoise rings and pendants. Turquoise is mostly associated with the Southwest, with spiritual roots in the Navajo and Hopi. But again: “My grandfather had huge turquoise rings,” she said. “So there’s this kind of adoption of the ‘pan-Indian’ version of things that are, in a way, fake — but then at some point, does it become real?”
Tremblay is at her best when probing questions like that. It’s made her an in-demand name in this town. In the first place, she’s in Los Angeles because she’s part of the writers’ room for Season 4 of “Dark Winds,” an AMC thriller series that takes place on and around the Navajo Nation; Season 3 premieres March 9. A little less recently, she was an executive story editor, writer and director for the hit FX series “Reservation Dogs,” a much-acclaimed coming-of-age story about a group of Native teens in Oklahoma. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts named her a “breakthrough artist” in 2024, while her feature film debut, “Fancy Dance,” starring Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone, was adored by critics. “Simply beautiful,” one reviewer wrote, “and hopefully, there’s much more to come.” Indeed, there is much more to come. But for now, on this foggy December evening in Venice Beach, Erica Tremblay is here instead, thumbing through pairs of tribal-patterned tube socks.
There are shops like this one all over the West. In towns like Moab and Springdale; on the outskirts of Las Vegas; along the California-Nevada border; and most of all, rising from the twisting blacktop between them, these touristy intersections of Native crafts and non-Native cash are so common that Native sketch comedy troupe The 1491s has a whole four-minute bit about “The Indian Store.”
When I’d suggested meeting here, Tremblay agreed right away. Turns out, though it never made it into the script, she and her fellow “Reservation Dogs” writers had toyed with the idea of building a scene inspired by this exact shop when the main characters — spoiler alert — make their way to California. It offered a perfect contrast between worlds old and new. Between the world that has been, and the one Tremblay and other creatives like her are trying to build.
Tremblay, who has blue eyes (often bracketed by the seven pairs of eyeglass frames she rotates daily), blonde hair and a pale complexion, looks more like her white dad’s side of the family than her Native mom’s. Not that that means anything after centuries of cultural mixing. Yet once, in a New York City elevator, she was wearing a pair of beaded earrings of the sort you might find at this gift shop, when a white woman with a yoga mat told her she should “think twice before appropriating other people’s cultures.” Never mind that Tremblay grew up on reservation land, with a mother who was on the tribal council. Never mind that she spent three years living in Canada, immersed with the last remaining speakers of the nearly extinct Cayuga language. “I get that grief more from non-Native people than I do from my own community,” she said. “And sometimes I just don’t want the grief of it. But I would maybe get down with some shoes,” she added, gesturing toward a pair of woven slip-ons. “I have a pair of those, and they’re really comfortable.”
Native American World and similar gift shops around the West court the gaze of tourists drawn in by something a little different and unexpected. That gaze was long the default assumption for Native stories in Hollywood. “For so long, Native Americans were allowed to be one of two things: the vicious savage or the peace-keeping shaman,” Tremblay said. “We are so many different things in between.” Her stories explore that rich middle terrain in a way that feels authentic to her experiences rather than pandering to that outdated default gaze. Tremblay, in other words, has gotten really comfortable reclaiming her culture in a space that wasn’t built for her.
Her feature film debut, for instance, started with a single word: knohá:ah, the Cayuga word for aunt, which translates more literally as “little mother.” That one term prompted a vision: a “little mother” and her niece, dancing in lockstep. In slow motion. In communion. She knew she wanted to tell a story that ended with that image. She just needed to figure out how to get there. Not only in terms of plot and storyline, characters and dialogue — but in terms of telling the story in a way that was uncompromising.
In a way that wouldn’t do more damage to her community by accident than has already been done on purpose.
“For so long, Native Americans were allowed to be one of two things: the vicious savage, or the peace-keeping shaman. We are so many different things in between.”
‘They need us’
A 2023 study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, led by professor Stacy Smith, found that in 1,600 top-grossing films between 2007 and 2022, less than one-quarter of 1 percent of speaking roles went to Native American characters. “Hollywood, left to its own devices, doesn’t care,” she says. Real support does exist in pockets — she cites Sundance and Netflix — but it’s still rare overall. And that makes it very difficult for Native storytellers to grab a lasting foothold; for new voices to emerge. Which can have serious consequences.
Every group — racial, ethnic, religious or otherwise — wants to be seen in pop culture as they really are, rather than as a caricature. This desire is especially relevant for Native Americans, who’ve been the target of systematic, government-sanctioned violence, cleansing and assimilation as recently as the 1980s. “This is a long, complicated, horrific genocide that’s still ongoing,” Tremblay says. It’s less direct than it used to be, but cultural erasure is one of the modern tools that continues to enable it. “I don’t know why any group needs to justify why they need to be seen,” Smith adds.
Bird Runningwater spent 20 years at the Sundance Institute trying to rectify the problem. What began as a program for Native filmmakers grew into an incubator for some of today’s most compelling storytellers — Tremblay among them. The same halls that welcomed her have also embraced Taika Waititi, who went from directing independent films to the Oscar best picture-nominated “Jojo Rabbit” and blockbusters like “Thor: Ragnarok”; Sydney Freeland, whose credits include massive properties like Marvel and “Star Trek” as well as her recent Netflix feature, “Rez Ball”; and Sterlin Harjo, whose “Reservation Dogs” brought raw Native stories to mainstream television. “I think it’s growing,” Tremblay says, considering the shift. “There’s just more opportunity for us to bring each other up.”
Runningwater points to the pandemic as the catalyst for the current movement’s success. With everyone stuck inside, and following 2020’s racial reckoning, the demand for Native stories reached new heights. “Rez Ball,” Freeland’s film about a high school basketball team on the Navajo reservation, marked the first Native feature film backed by a major studio. Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” likewise secured an “unheard-of acquisition price” when Apple bought the distribution rights. Harjo parlayed his “Reservation Dogs” success into a new project starring Ethan Hawke. Yet at the same time, Runningwater adds, the industry’s enthusiasm has noticeably slowed. “Our strides are kind of getting bigger,” he says, “but in a climate where less and less seems to be happening for diverse storytellers. … I think we’re at a pivotal moment right now.”
In an era of audience fragmentation, there’s a strong business argument to be made for funding and promoting stories rooted in particular cultures. “These companies are losing money,” Smith says. “They don’t understand who their audience is.” For Tremblay, the audience she keeps foremost in mind is people from her own culture. But people of all cultures and backgrounds, she believes, crave stories that are authentically told. And if Hollywood disagrees, well, she isn’t too worried. “Hollywood needs us more than we need Hollywood,” she says. “If Hollywood wants to tell stories about Native Americans that are truthful, then they need us.”
In the 1,600 top-grossing films between 2007 and 2022, less than one quarter of 1 percent of speaking roles went to Native American characters.
Something special
Smoke curled toward the ceiling as one member of the Seneca-Cayuga tribal council offered an impassioned rebuttal while the others chain-smoked cigarettes. It was here, growing up on the Missouri side of the Oklahoma-Missouri border and watching her mom during council meetings, that Erica Tremblay learned to tell stories. The Seneca-Cayuga Nation is a “consensus-based community,” which in practice means “a lot of passionate oratory,” she explains.
She didn’t much enjoy the meetings back then. She’d have much rather been at home watching Quentin Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson films. Or, more often, the 50-cent bargain rentals from the video store — the old black-and-white stuff, from Shirley Temple to Alfred Hitchcock. Those movies prompted her to ask her mom for a secondhand camcorder, which she used to shoot backyard films she wrote and directed. The cast starred her sister, cousins and friends, with storylines like a meeting of Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan and all the other famous Michaels she could think of. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, does Tremblay realize how the smoke-filled rooms of her youth reinforced her camcorder instincts.
She sometimes visited her non-Native father, who lived in Idaho, and those trips made her thirst for a big gulp of the wider world. But not if it meant leaving important parts of herself behind. Not without applying the council’s wisdom to her pursuits, like she once did as a teenager during a debate tournament. In a contest against other local schools along the Oklahoma-Missouri border, she won. Her prize? A trophy topped by a man standing at a lectern. “I just won this tournament. I just won this trophy,” she thought. “And I am not a man standing at a lectern.” Part of being a great storyteller, she gathered from the council’s fits of “passionate oratory,” meant standing up for herself. She bought an action figure of Mary Jane Watson — Spider-Man’s love interest — and Scotch taped it over the man.
Not long after, in 2000, she earned a college scholarship to Southwest Missouri State. The closest she could get to a camera and production, she thought, was to study broadcast journalism, so that’s what she did. But as a 20-year-old sophomore, she watched a film called “High Art.” At the very end, when the credits began to roll, the writer and director’s name flashed: Lisa Cholodenko. Tremblay felt a physical reaction. Until that precise moment, she had never considered that women could make movies. “It makes me so angry and so sad that I waited until I was 20 years old to even imagine myself in that role,” she says, “even though I was doing it with the VHS recorder!” She switched her major to media studies, then followed a friend to Omaha after graduation. She worked a few odd jobs until she got hired as a production assistant on a movie that was filming in town, which made her think she might be able to make it in LA. She saved $2,000, packed up her Mitsubishi Mirage and headed West.
She realized — quickly — that she needed health insurance and a livable wage to survive, so she found work in advertising and publishing that eventually took her from LA to New York City, where she had a chic corporate office leading video teams for some major publications, including Esquire, Marie Claire and Bustle. But in 2018, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d veered off track. “I just remembered those dreams,” she says. She’d known about Sundance’s Indigenous Program for a while, but she’d never applied out of fear. With the application deadline coming up on a Monday, she sat down the prior Thursday and fired off a script for a short film. Runningwater called her when she was seated in her New York City office to tell her she was one of two who’d been accepted. “And it changed everything,” Tremblay says.
Runningwater knew immediately that Tremblay’s voice was something special when he read the script Tremblay submitted, based on her mother’s life as a teacher in Oklahoma. It spoke to an unmistakable, uncompromising feminine sensibility that reflected the Seneca-Cayuga tribe’s matriarchal culture. “I just thought,” Runningwater remembers, “that those were flames that needed to be fanned and supported.” The process of making the short film only encouraged his initial judgment. He remembers a critique of one particular scene that Tremblay herself admitted she didn’t quite understand. “Her willingness to be vulnerable and uncomfortable in that space,” Runningwater remembers, was unique, and spoke to what became a clear pattern of soliciting feedback and guidance to become the best-possible storyteller. Her dedication quickly paid dividends. The short film, titled “Little Chief,” starred a young Lily Gladstone — later nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon” — and was accepted by the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, which led to an agent, which led to an onslaught of opportunities. But not without a small detour.
She wouldn’t call it that. She would say it was necessary. Exactly where she needed to be: in Canada, among the last native speakers, immersed in the Cayuga language. “Little Chief” had shown her she didn’t want her corporate job anymore, and her instincts told her what she needed instead was “going back to community.” Her own community’s last native speaker died in 1989, so the Canadian tribe’s formal immersion was her only chance to learn Cayuga. In her studies, she found the connection to her culture she was looking for. “You can tell a lot about a worldview by how the language is set up,” she explains. The Cayuga language, for example, is very verb-based and very woman-centric. In Cayuga, a tree isn’t just a tree — a noun. A thing. A tree is something in motion and connected with everything around it. And the default pronoun is “she,” while the word for chief translates to “she holds him by the horns.” Because Native culture today is so heavily influenced by mainstream Western/American culture, it’s difficult to imagine what tribal culture might have looked like before Europeans arrived. But in the language, Tremblay found echoes. “I fell in love,” she says, “with the worldview I was seeing.”
From “Reservation Dogs” to “Dark Winds,” that sensibility became a defining feature of all her projects, including some still in the works. She’s developing a family crime drama set on a reservation — a “Native American Sopranos,” she calls it — as well as a horror adaptation and even a short story for an eager publisher. But the worldview is especially prominent in “Fancy Dance,” her feature-length debut.
It wasn’t just the word “little mother” alone, even though that’s where the idea started; she also decided to use Cayuga as a literary device. The film takes place in Oklahoma, and the main characters all speak spurts of Cayuga throughout. You would not find that in Oklahoma today, but for Tremblay, it’s about creating something aspirational. “It’s what I wish was happening in the present,” she says, “and what I want to see for the future.”
The film’s plotline follows Jax, played by Gladstone, and her teenage niece, Roki. Roki’s mother has disappeared, and Jax is looking after Roki while also leading search efforts. Because of Jax’s prior drug charges, the state comes to take Roki away and place her with Jax’s father, who is white and lives off the reservation. Jax’s father is not malicious, nor is his new wife, Nancy. “We wanted to give those characters empathy,” Tremblay says. “They’re not just one sided, like, ‘Oh, the white people are the bad people.’” What they are is clueless.
In one pivotal scene, Nancy tries to connect with Roki, who is interested in powwow dancing, by gifting her a pair of old ballet slippers. It’s a well-intentioned gesture, but it places Nancy, rather than Roki, at the center of the interaction. Roki tries to explain that powwow dancing isn’t just a series of steps and performance like ballet; that it’s “a way to be together.” For Tremblay, that moment is all about correcting the record. “It’s a way to live. It’s vibrant. It’s evolving,” she says. “It moves and morphs and shapes.” She hopes non-Native viewers can appreciate that. And if not, well, once again, she isn’t too worried. “I’ve always just been that way,” she says. “Even if it’s with Scotch tape, I’m gonna try and find a way to correct it.”
It’s difficult to imagine what tribal culture might have looked like before Europeans arrived. But in the Cayuga language, Tremblay found echoes.
‘A demolition derby’
Erica Tremblay’s grandmother used to make dream catchers. Dream catchers didn’t originate with her tribe; they have roots in the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region. But in the 1960s and ’70s, they were adopted by the “pan-Indian movement” as a symbol of unity across tribes. Pan-Indianism became a potent organizing strategy for Natives, even though it also effectively stripped tribes of cultural differences. Where did her grandmother learn to make dream catchers? At the Indian Center, Tremblay supposes. Or maybe at the community hall. As if the learning occurred by osmosis. “Where,” she wonders, “do you learn any of it?”
This history is precisely what makes the current moment in Native storytelling so interesting, Runningwater says — and so new. You could almost think of Natives on screen as part of three waves: The first was the classic, cliche, warrior-or-peacekeeper dichotomy. Then came 1998’s “Smoke Signals,” which premiered at Sundance and felt like something completely different. “‘Smoke Signals’ definitely kicked off a movement and an era,” Runningwater says. “But ‘Smoke Signals’ was what you would call a broad, generalized, pan-Indian kind of story.” He has encouraged Native storytellers to move beyond pan-Indianism and embrace what makes their specific tribal identities unique, which helped unleash the current, third wave. Tremblay’s work and other projects like it, therefore, walk a tightrope between challenging pan-Indian ideas without forsaking the movements that have come before.
Consider “Reservation Dogs,” the breakthrough TV hit Tremblay wrote and directed for. Sterlin Harjo’s guiding light for the entire show was to avoid Native cliches. “I think the biggest part about its redefinition came from dismantling the expectation of Indigenous art,” says Mato Wayuhi, a 27-year-old Lakota artist who composed the show’s score. “I think expectation can be a really dehumanizing component to any art form,” he adds, noting that he walks a delicate path between honoring what came before and building something different. “So we’re paying credence to that while also destroying it. It’s like making a new sculpture out of the same clay.” His compositions do incorporate some traditional elements — but they also include unambiguously Western elements, like cellos, with hip-hop and other modern influences, all blended into something familiar and new at once. “Part of the duty of the next generation is to destroy what came before you,” he says, quoting Harjo. “And I think ‘Rez Dogs’ is a demolition derby.”
But how do Native creators draw the line between honoring what’s come before and building something different and new? What does it mean to be “authentic”? It’s an important question given that authenticity is the North Star of Tremblay’s work. How does she navigate when “fake” things become authentic, like at the gift shop? More precisely, considering her aspirational use of the Cayuga language in “Fancy Dance” — how does she thread the needle when making authentic things fake?
‘That’s the struggle'
A day before we had met at Native American World, I joined Erica Tremblay at IHOP. She chose IHOP because it was near her office for “Dark Winds” — a space in Santa Monica that also produces “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” But she also chose it because, compared to the many hipster coffee shops and chic cocktail bars nearby, it felt familiar. “I’m more of an IHOP person,” she says. “I grew up at Denny’s, or Shoney’s, or IHOP with my family. When we could scrounge up enough money, my mom would take us to get pancake breakfasts at places like this.”
Her characters in “Fancy Dance” are likewise “IHOP people.” In one scene, Jax and Roki visit a nameless diner. “You can have whatever you want,” Jax says, grinning. Roki orders strawberry pancakes, strawberry waffles, strawberry blintzes and strawberry crepes. That’s one small example of how Tremblay kept the story authentic to her experiences, but bigger ones abound. Namely, the missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis. If you’re Native and have any social media accounts, she explains, you are going to come across someone’s cousin or friend or aunt who has vanished without a trace. She’d spent many nights and weekends working for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, so she knew this crisis well, and she knew she wanted it to be central. She also knew Jax would be loosely based on the protagonist from “Little Chief.” But she also knew, as a first-time feature film writer, that she needed help.
She partnered with Miciana Alise, a fellow Native screenwriter whose script she’d read during her Sundance program. She liked Alise’s romantic comedy sensibilities and wanted her to bring them to the relationship between Jax and Roki. Together, they molded the rest of the story, which begins with Jax and Roki stealing a pickup truck from a white fly fisherman. “I love not feeling alone in the work,” she says. Yet, in some ways, Tremblay is always alone.
“I never feel like what I do is good enough,” she admits. “I have been this person my whole life. If it’s not perfection, it’s not good enough. And perfection is not possible. So that’s the struggle.” It’s such a pervasive feeling that, when “Fancy Dance” premiered at Sundance in 2023, she watched it and decided she would never watch any of her own screenings ever again. With one notable exception.
She did attend a screening of “Fancy Dance” for Seneca-Cayuga tribal elders. She was excited for them to see their language on the silver screen for the first time — but also terrified of how they might react. They reacted by affectionately squeezing her cheeks when it was done. “Getting that cheek squeeze from them is the best thing ever,” she says with a grin. But she also knows it won’t always be like that. It can’t be.
Her “Native American Sopranos,” for example, is sure to be controversial among Native viewers, because it will portray Native characters doing unsavory things. She knows some people won’t like that. But the way she sees it, non-Native cinema has allowed its characters to explore those gray areas forever — and her characters should be allowed the same privilege. They should be fully formed. She’s already garnered some criticism for Jax and Roki stealing the fly fisherman’s car, but usually, those notes come from non-Native viewers. “Aren’t you worried that your portrayal of Jax and Roki being criminals is gonna make your community look bad?” they ask.
“If you are watching this movie, and you’re worried about them stealing some gas at the gas station,” Tremblay answered, taking a sip from her IHOP decaf, “then you’re part of the problem.”
The next day, at the Venice Beach gift shop, Tremblay taught me about powwows. Originally, she explained, powwows were roadside attractions for white people. They’d come and watch the Indians do Indian things. But unlike Indian ceremonies, powwows were legal. So over time, they morphed into a way for Natives to come together and celebrate community. They became something new. “It’s kind of like a weird reclamation of a slur,” she said. “The culture takes it over, and accepts it, and subverts it, and uses it in a way that wasn’t intended.”
She didn’t mention her reclamation of an industry that has long shut out voices like hers; she spoke instead about her turquoise jewelry — and her other jewelry that, while Native-made, would not fit in here.
As we headed for the exit and the hazy, mist-filled beach beyond, she had a lot of places to be. She was due in the “Dark Winds” writers’ room to cobble the Season 4 script until April, when she’ll return to her home in central New York, near Ithaca. She chose to live there, with her partner and their two cats, rather than her native Missouri/Oklahoma, because it’s where her people lived before colonization, and she wants to be as close to those ancestors as possible. But before she kept moving toward those things and all the others, she stopped. Something caught her attention near the door.
It was a display of T-shirts facing the street, featuring eight designs. One was a Native warrior in war paint and a feather headdress, staring menacingly beside a bear. Another featured four Native leaders as “The original Mount Rushmore,” while another included howling wolves. The rest, however, felt downright random. A T. rex. A bunch of green skulls. A cat captioned with “I’d spend all 9 lives with you.” “That’s such a snapshot,” Tremblay said, with drumbeats blaring from invisible speakers, “of like — why?” She pulled out her phone, and she snapped some pictures, and she laughed.
Then she walked away, leaving the shop in the fog behind her.
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.