[Prey, the latest film in the Hollywood Predator series, breaks
new ground in its authentic portrayal of Indigenous Americans, thanks
to its Comanche producer and Sioux lead]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW THE PREDATOR FRANCHISE IS BREAKING NEW GROUND FOR NATIVE
AMERICANS ON SCREEN  
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Phil Hoad
July 29, 2022
The Guardian
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_ Prey, the latest film in the Hollywood Predator series, breaks new
ground in its authentic portrayal of Indigenous Americans, thanks to
its Comanche producer and Sioux lead _

Amber Midthunder as Naru in Prey., Photograph: David Bukach/20th
Century Studios

 

Would you be surprised to learn that Native Americans
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toothbrushes? Or would you be more surprised to learn this from a
Predator film? At the same time as giving us the usual invisible
alien-inflicted butchery, Prey, the fifth and latest instalment of the
franchise, delivers its first history lesson.

This lithe, primitivist reinvention takes place in 1719, when a band
of Comanche find themselves becoming quarry for one of the
intergalactic trophy-hunters who has turned up a few centuries too
early to run into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Packed with authentic period
detail (such as the Indigenous oral hygiene), it’s probably the
first big-budget film about Native Americans since 1992’s Last of
the Mohicans.

Representation is the kind of woke buzzword that would have had Arnie
and his meathead brigade reaching for their grenade-launchers back in
the 80s. And Prey doubles down by making its hero a woman. Amber
Midthunder, a 25-year-old Assiniboine Sioux actor who plays lead
character Naru, says that she has been selective in the past when it
comes to Indigenous roles. “A different level of care goes into
choosing them because often the representation is not the best,
especially for people who get so little representation.” But,
spaceships aside, she says Prey felt different. “For a period piece,
it showed so much more cultural accuracy, instead of boiling us down
to something one-dimensional, like that hyper-spiritual side or
something overly violent.”

That this Hollywood-produced film doesn’t step into any cultural
mantraps is down to its Comanche producer, Jhane Myers. She was hired
by the director, Dan Trachtenberg, to ensure this frontier sci-fi
remained grounded in Native American reality. With her CV – Comanche
and Blackfoot advocate, traditional artist and craftsperson, and
world-champion buckskin dancer – she reminded him of the film’s
resourceful protagonist. “He said talking to me was like talking to
the grownup Naru,” says Myers.

The kind of cultural consultancy work she had done before on the likes
of The Lone Ranger and Wind River can be limited in scope, she says.
“A director may have something written, and that’s just the way
it’s going to be whether it’s true or not. You can voice that, but
doesn’t always mean that’s going to happen.” Having full
producer status on Prey was a major step up, she says. “If
somebody’s a consultant, they’re not on there full-time – maybe
they’re on the phone or whatever. But when you’re there in person
and hands-on, it makes a big difference.”

Myers compiled a hefty manual of Comanche customs that Prey’s
various production departments could make reference to: everything
from the earth pigments used to make the tribe’s signature black,
red and white colours, to how they cured meat. The plot device of a
young woman who wants to break custom and become a warrior sounds like
a modern concoction. But in fact, Myers points out, there are many
precedents in Native American history, including Buffalo Calf Road
Woman, who killed General Custer, according to some sources, and the
Apache warrior Lozen. To match up to these illustrious predecessors,
Midthunder, along with the rest of the cast, attended the Native
American version of the now-traditional Hollywood bootcamp, learning
archery, tomahawk and spear-fighting.

Working alongside Juanita Pahdopony, another Comanche educator,
Myers’ influence helped reshape the script from the inside out. Naru
was originally named Kee, which means “no” in the tribe’s
language. But Myers felt she should be named for what she did; in this
case, “fight”. She also objected to the practice of giving
Indigenous characters generic names, such as Comanche No 1; even the
most disposable of French trappers got to enjoy being called the likes
of Rambert in the three seconds before they were eviscerated by the
Predator. “So I assigned them names,” says Myers. “It gave the
actors more spirit to get into their character. If I’m Native Woman
No 1, I don’t know what that feels like. But if my name is Naru, and
I have fight and I have that kind of spirit, I know what that’s
like, right?”

You believe she does. Myers says she moved into producing in order to
change “everything” about the way Hollywood depicted her people.
From the earliest westerns, Native Americans have been, in her eyes,
“romanticised by people that really didn’t know our culture”.
When Indigenous people look for films in which they feel
well-represented, there are only “bits and pieces” in the canon
that do the job. A friend of hers says that Hollywood discovers Native
Americans every 20 years; two rounds back saw perhaps the most
prominent example, Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves. She concedes
that film was respectfully done, but points out that the subtitled
Lakota was often completely mistranslated. She still sees the same
kind of corner-cutting. “A lot of times when you try to add Native
content or correct things in a script, you come up against: ‘Oh, we
don’t have the budget for that. Oh, it would be too hard.’ So I
want to shift that paradigm.”

Midthunder believes that Native American opportunities on screen are
slowly expanding. She compares the situation to that of her actor
father, David Midthunder, who was offered only a series of what she
calls “feathers and leathers” roles: trackers, hunters and scouts.
(Billy, the laconic point man in the original Predator played by the
part-Cherokee actor Sonny Landham, was in that vein.) “Only recently
are we getting projects that have Native characters afforded things
like personalities and relationships, and be seen in urban
societies,” says Midthunder. She points to teen comedy Reservation
Dogs
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co-created by Seminole film-maker Sterlin Harjo with Taika Waititi –
and her own role in X-Men spin-off Legion
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where her mutant character’s Native heritage is mentioned but not
defining. The 2021 indie drama Wild Indian
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a kind of Indigenous American Psycho from Chippewa director Lyle
Mitchell Corbine Jr – is another groundbreaking recent
standard-bearer.

Before it was finalised, Myers screened Prey to the various
departments of the Comanche nation. They loved it, but what they loved
most of all was the fact that, for once, they were being screened an
unfinished film – when they still had the chance to reshape it. One
thing the studio wouldn’t budge on was putting the film out as
standard in the Comanche dub (the language only features sporadically
in the English version) – a shame when you consider the likes of
Apocalypto have shown that that level of immersive authenticity can
work for mainstream audiences.

But the most important thing, as its producer points out, is that it
exists in the mainstream arena at all. “Because it’s sci-fi,
it’s action, yet it has Native culture in it, there are young
film-makers that will watch it and be excited to do something of their
own. We’re barely scratching the surface of the Native content
market. It’s untapped. Imagine if somebody does something totally
off the hook just because they watched this.” Hopefully soon,
camouflaged aliens will be the only kind of on-screen invisibility
Native Americans have to contend with.

 Prey is available on Disney+ on 5 August.

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