00:00:05 Speaker 1: 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. Whose land is he my dad? Like some Texas ranchers, but they're never here early. We're gonna hunt it, you know. So we would go over there and we'd hunt it. 00:00:22 Speaker 2: 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 Nation, Sterling Harjoe. He's forty four 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 Grease and say you might, how does this fancy filmmaker have anything to do with gritty, rural Americano livin. 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 gonna 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 Acorn Pro that's spelled a ker n spelled the right way. Acorn Pro from Phelps. It's the industry's only inhale, exhale, grunt and bleak call. Me and Jason Phelps and the team work together built this call. It's my favorite call and it's just in time for hunting season on the Phelps website. 00:02:07 Speaker 1: 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 behind the scenes, 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 gotta be? You gotta be in Hollywood or something. 00:02:43 Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land by FHF gear, American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. 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 a kitchen, sterling things that used to belong to an oil company in the seventies, and they entertained. 00:03:44 Speaker 1: People up here. 00:03:45 Speaker 2: 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. Sterling'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 tepees 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, and 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 and want to break bread with you. But for now, I'm pretty much gonna let Sterling tell us his life story. 00:04:47 Speaker 1: Uh yeah, my name's Sterling. Harjoe, I am Muskogee Creek and Seminole, and also Italian and Scottish and German and other things. But well, I was born in Holding the Oklahoma and I grew up Holdenvills in Hughes County. It's on the Muscogy 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 two tribes are very intertwined and to the point where we speak the same language. The Moscogy Creeks were a confederacy. I always heard that the Muscogee language was a trade language, and so all of the all the different bands and groups that made up the Muscogee Creek Nation, they all had like a shared trade language. The customs in the way of life is very similar, and so that's where I grew up. I now live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm the filmmaker. I created the show Reservation Dogs as an 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 Emmy's. Yeah, it's been a crazy couple of 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 and that's who I am. Yeah, I grew up in Holdenville. Holdenville was you know, it was a cool place. I have nothing but like the best memories from growing up in Holdenville. I mean rural Oklahoma, but yeah, it was just sort of an idyllic 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 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 the best of both worlds where I had 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, and 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 ten dollars and I thought I was rich. And it was about pollution. And I drew this like lake with all these fish and animals, you know, dying, and I would I got a picture of the you know, my picture is like cover of the whole Middle newspaper. And 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. My grandma on my mom's side, who's my Native grandma, and then my grandpa on mother's side, was Native and both full blood Native, which made my parents half which two haves together make me which I'm half and so my native grandma, Johnny May was her name, Johnny May Kalinach. There was a thing called the Relocation Act, and back in the day, and it was sort of this way of 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, you know there and there was like so many government policies that were in direct assault of that community. The DAWs Act, you know, we'll give you one hundred and eighty 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 these all of the tribes had communal living. There was no homelessness, there was no there was no body gone hungry, you know, we worked together to feed each other. Something about that offended I think the US 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 clinicch Nor. George was his name, but he went by Rock and they fell in love. Had my uncle em 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 ens with the last name Kalinich, so you know. And then my dad's Harjo. Harjo is a from a Moscoi 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 ever's eighties. 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 barber shop, and I just kind of grew up with the community coming through this place. My dad was a construction worker but also 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 hard dressed martial arts last year. And my dad's kind of like he 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 and my dad was kind of a hippie, you know, Natives were like the best hippie, like a Southern hippie, though, like like we're very I think Southern hippies are very different California hippies, you know, like Southern hippies will still like eat a squirrel, you know, but like wore bell bottoms, you know. And you know, 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. That it would be our late sixties in holding the and my dad wear a wig to school. And one of the principles was like on the hunt for my dad for growing his hair out too long. And one day he yanked the yanked the wig off my dad, and my dad's hair comes out, and my dad quit school. You know, 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's 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, I 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 and every time we walked in, she'd say, go shake everybody's hand, and I have to go shake everyone's hand in that room, and she'd be like, that's because and that's because, and that's because, that's because, that's because that's causin that's just a cous you know. It's like how many cousins do I have? And how am I going to get married? You know, And so I'd have to go through it to 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 it to be real. And I don't think enough people in Hollywood and modern sort of entertainment to 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 it was a cool existence. I mean, I felt very much like stand by Me. You know, like 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. 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, it's our land, well, 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 fish and holl are we going to sneak into? And me and my cousin were fourteen, driving my dad's car and like dirt roads and like we'd go fishing and somebody's land like whatever. And then you know, there's an episode, episode six or the first season where it's just the father and daughter hunting. That's all it is. And that's kind of 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. 00:15:14 Speaker 2: Here's a 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. 00:15:32 Speaker 1: Where'd you get the picture of a trail camp? I don't own a trail camp? What what do you mean? Whose is it? Then it's probably the owners? Eh, owners, Yep, don't we own this line? No, we're Indian. We don't own a land. 00:15:53 Speaker 2: 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. 00:16:29 Speaker 1: 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 across the road this giant acreage of land across our dirt road where we lived on a hill outside of Holtonville. I didn't know what 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. Whose land is? He my dad like some Texas ranchers. But we're never hearing. Really we're gonna hunt it, you know. So we would go over there and we'd and you know, my dad even told a story one time he was 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 came. I just watch it and walk by and they're talking about their wives. 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 feel dressed and everything just feeling. I always tell people that 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 over riding 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 us, saying bye, and me driving down the dirt road in the rearview, 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 releasing land outside of Holding Bill. It was kind of sectioned out. This land was kind of sectioned out, and 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 uh, and I remember him just really being suspicious of us, and and my dad's the type of guy he'll talk, you know, you know, hey, yeah, boy, may we ain't seen nothing down there? 00:19:10 Speaker 3: You know. 00:19:11 Speaker 1: It's like just chatting the guy up, and I'm 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 and me is going like you say it, 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 releasing it. And he's calling the owner and my Dad's like, yeah, I get me call. 00:19:32 Speaker 3: You know. 00:19:32 Speaker 1: My Dad's just chatting them up, and I'm just over there like, oh, you know, like you know. And then when I whenever I bought my land outside of town that I hunt on, it was pretty big. I remember we were driving it was It was right when I was about to buy it hadn't all went through, and I took my dad there and we were we were driving out there, and I think he thought it was just some land outside of the city. It wasn't gonna be good, you know, And like he said, he's like, are you sure is that there's woods there? Like you think we can hunt on it? Like I'm like, dude, we can't. So we get out there. We got on the side by side he's just blown away. Were driving. He said, oh my god, he's just like we're driving away and he just starts yelling, like at the top of his lungs, got a cuss on this. Can you bleep it out? Can I bleep? Can? I I'll blieve it? Okay, And he's yelling, we don't need your fing 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. You know. That wasn't until you know, honestly, like watching meat Eater 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 felt, 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. 00:21:34 Speaker 3: Yeah, Oklahoma was sort of a reservation. 00:21:45 Speaker 1: I was in a territory at one time, so it was all Indian land and eastern Okahama, which would have been holding Bill in Tulsa and Talaqua and everything was at one point going to be a Native state. It was lost by one vote, which is obviously crooked. 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, the Muscoge 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 Muscogee Creek Reservation right now, literally as we speak, your feet are. And then that opened the door for 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 Nation Land is about an hour and a half south. 00:22:44 Speaker 2: Did you grow up on the Seminole Reservation or no? 00:22:47 Speaker 1: I mean technically yeah, but it's not a reservation like that. I think that you would be thinking. 00:22:52 Speaker 2: Which is like a closed just be like a town. 00:22:55 Speaker 1: I'm in a town and I'm town in the south, but there's a lot of brown people here, you know what I mean? Like yeah, and I think that we technically at reservation. But because Oklahoma was I mean, it's just a crazy history of Oklahoma's like the most unique of all the states. It used to be in in territory and then you know, you look at all of the you know, you watch True Grit, We're going into the territory. You know, Hanging Judge Parker, that was all into terrors. Oklahoma. It was placed where criminals went because they get away with stuff, and there was it was lawless because it was 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 and 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 behind the scenes. And 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 gotta 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, oh, that's cool, like maybe I could tell the 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 gonna 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 her. I wrote this story about it, and she read it and kind of realized I was a writer. And then 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, and he gave it back to me. And he said it's not for minute ride. I won't read it, and he's like, you should take this class. So I took this class. It was intro to Film and Video Studies by this Hungarian teacher filmmaker named Misha Nadelkovich, and yeah, 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. And once I realized that, I was sort of hooked and I got into all of these he started showing me movies by John Cassavetti's or you know, the French New Way of 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. That's I had my heart set on it. After that, I just began writing, and I remember telling my friends. You know, I'm wanna make a movie in two years, and they all right, and I made it. At four or 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, Rapaho and Mescalero Apache guy that grew up in Oklahoma, New Mexico 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. 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, and 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 America storytellers. He came and spoke about Sundance. I went and 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 Writer's Lab, got rejected. I mean, 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 writer's lab and I left school, went to the writer's lab and director's lab, and they 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, we're heroes of mine, all of a sudden giving me advice. After that, I went to LA to do some meetings. So I was like, you know, cause Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, all these filmmakers came out of the labs. So I thought, oh man, I'm next, Like I'm next on line. 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 LA 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 gonna be making movies now. And I remember going in and just like getting the worst feedback, whereas 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 Indian movie, you know, and like I don't know how to do that, you know. And then or like people would say, like Indian movies don't sell, or they'd say like this is Indian enough, or it's two Indian. And so I was like, I'm gonna 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. She's the 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 Sindance Film Vestval in other places around the world, won some awards, got critical acclaim and I was like, Okay, now's the time I'm gonna be making movies now, you know, and instilled nothing two thousand and five around there, and then you know, nothing would happen a couple of 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 two thousand and nine and got that funded. I mean, these are like one hundred thousand dollar movies, you know, no one's getting paid, and a small crew, and you know, I get some actors together, and then the actors are so appreciative because, like you know, Richard Ray Whitman and Casey cam Hornet were both the elites and 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 Barking Water, she was like, you know, I've been a dead Indian and almost all the tribes, but my own she's I'm really good looking dead outside of a tepee, 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 sun Dance and played at the Venice Film Festival in Italy and all these things, and it was a you know, 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 a long form magazine and I did documentaries for him, 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 filmmaker because doing the 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 the performance out of you and I don't know you, you know, it's like so it 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 taking telling stories and changing a community that was right here where I'm at locally. This Land also produced the documentary This Maybe the Last Time, which is about songs and it's about my family and things like that. You know, there's a point where I was going to quit. There was a point where I wanted to start a nonprofit that was gonna 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 wanted 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 reintroducing salmon fishing and cooking back into the community. So I was like very inspired by that. I was like, I'm gonna do that back home. And then things changed, and I'd always gambled that they would change. I just like, I'm gonna 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 to 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'd been like I've been here, man, like where have you been? And so I don't know, like I saw it changing, felt it changing. And then my friend who is Mallory from the Indigenous people of New Zealand, Tackle y t t 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'd 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. And so me and Tackle 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 Ragnarock, and you know, people recognizing me. You can't walk down the street all of a sudden with them. You know. I saw a lot of people want things from him with that. Fame comes to 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. So if you have any ideas, let me know. And he and I had been reading each other's work for a long time, so in 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 like, what if we took those two and combined him 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 affects got a show, and he was like, I see it, buddy, you go hope you do, hope you make it. You hope you make it good, and you know, 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 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, a bunch of different ways, from many different cultures. I happened 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, it's big and 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 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 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, uh, 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 recognize you telling the story of Tokumsea, 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 how 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 this. I think. 00:38:53 Speaker 2: So in Reservation Dogs, there's a viral scene where Stirling 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. In all the Native people knew exactly what it meant. Owls are bad news to almost all North American Indian tribes, and Stirling was making light of it. 00:39:20 Speaker 1: Again. 00:39:21 Speaker 2: It was brilliant. I asked him to expound on his doctrine on owls, which, as you all know, is a beast that's close to my heart. I really hope this doesn't mean that we can't be friends. 00:39:35 Speaker 1: You grew 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 in my backyard verse 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 like, no, it's not an owl. For you know, it was 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 over enough indiens that he knows how we feel. But he's also like, it's just an owl. And I'm just like, I'm going in, you know. And 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. It's a stickinny and that is a shape shifter, a person that could turn themselves into an owl and get up to no good. You know, there's sounds. So so that is like our one of our biggest sort of that is the boogeyman. For us, it's like watch out for stiguineas you know, and so nothing good is happening when you hear it owl. It's either you know someone's gonna die or someone has shape shifted into one and they're coming for you. 00:41:13 Speaker 2: You know. 00:41:13 Speaker 1: Any way, you're screwed. I guess it didn't. 00:41:16 Speaker 2: It didn't make it into the Native American tribes that the barred owl is one of the greatest turkey shop gobbles of all time. 00:41:22 Speaker 1: 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 will say that it's a messenger of change, not just death. But my dad's only memory of my grandpa died when he was five. It's him shooting 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 following us. We're both like, God, he's a lask native, you know, and I'm but same they. 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 gonna 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 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 brothers killed and so it's like you see, 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 that has happened, you know. So so if I hear four talking to each other in my backyard, I'm gonna go inside. Yeah, so we put an owl there was an owl outside of a Uncle Brownie's house hanging there, and we as a joke as a for the natives that blurred the eyes out, you know, 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. It's like, what was it with the blurred out eyes on the owl? 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. Like 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 and people are curious about things, you know. It doesn't feel like it's talking down to anyone or I had originally written in there that it was a taxidermy now, but my friend that directed it is Navajo. Well Navajos could even be more superstitious, you know, and he's like, there's no tax derval, Like we're gonna get We're gonna get a porcelain now, and so you know, it's not a taxi every now, it's just like a it's a porcelain or something. You know, it's a plastic. 00:43:55 Speaker 2: I think, Yeah, what's the future going to be like for you? 00:44:04 Speaker 1: There's some stuff that I want to meg. 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. That's part of what I want to do. I want to bring education in for film as well. I have a thing called the Tulsa Artist Tulsa Film Collective that we show films and bring artists in the 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 want to make the place better and I want to make Native people more visible in the city. I mean, when I first came to Tulsa, I have a film called Miko and it's about a homeless community and Natives and 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 fictional but it's changed a lot since then. I think that Tuls has taken more pride in that side of things, and I hope to kind of be a part of more of that. 00:45:11 Speaker 2: 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. 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 ak er n pro 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, and we thank you guys for listening. Keep the Wild Places Wild