TheWrap magazine: «Most of the time, indigenous folks on television or in film are relegated to what we call ‘feathers and leather,’» says the Native writer and actress
A version of this story about Jana Schmieding first appeared in the Comedy & Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. For years, Jana Schmieding was pretty sure of one thing: She wasn’t cut out for television. A Lakota Sioux comedian, writer and podcaster, she’d grown up in Oregon rarely seeing anybody like her on TV — and even when she tried pitching pilots about the community she’d come from, she got nowhere. “I saw people on TV sometimes who looked like my ancestors,” she said. “Most of the time, indigenous folks on television or in film are relegated to what we call ‘feathers and leather.’ We’re trapped in the past, and there are very few contemporary (Native) television characters. I had to find people like me in characters like Darlene from ‘Roseanne,’ because she was the daughter of an overbearing mom.” But now Schmieding is both a writer and a star of “Rutherford Falls,” the Peacock comedy created by Ed Helms, Michael Schur and Sierra Teller Ornelas. It was Ornelas, a Navajo writer and producer, who offered Schmieding a spot in the writers room and then encouraged her to audition for the role of Reagan Wells, a long-suffering member of the fictional Minishonka Nation who also happens to be the best friend of Helms’ Nathan Rutherford, a town historian devoted to celebrating the white ancestor who “founded” the town on Native territory.
