For Comanche actor Gil Birmingham, who stars in Yellowstone as the leader of the fictional Broken Rock tribe, creating alliances between Native Americans and non-Natives alike is crucial both onscreen and off.
While Birmingham’s character, Thomas Rainwater, has had his ups and downs with Kevin Costner’s Montana rancher John Dutton, the actor praises series creator Taylor Sheridan as an Indigenous ally.
Sheridan has faced criticism in the Native community for his work on the show, which begins airing its final episodes Nov. 10 on the Paramount Network. The writer, director and producer has been called out by some for attempting to tell Indigenous stories through a white lens — and profiting off of them as well.
Having worked on the show for five seasons, Birmingham says Sheridan’s approach to including Native stories is misunderstood.
“Taylor does whatever he can do and utilizes whatever resources he has access to to make things as genuine and authentic as they can be,” Birmingham told Yahoo Entertainment. “Mo Brings Plenty, my partner in the show, is an elder out of the Lakota reservation [and] grew up with the culture. He knows these things, and he’s our cultural advisor.”
Birmingham said he understands the “legitimate” concern from Native people. “They feel like these stories are being exploited because they’re not written by a Native man,” he explained.
He said there are several obstacles that Native creatives face in Hollywood.
“The economic conditions aren’t such that we can just go and do these things by ourselves,” Birmingham said. “That’s the goal, but my experience in my career is that it’s going to take the alliance and collaboration of allies to be able to help get that foot, you know, one step up.”
In Yellowstone, which is winding down its fifth and final season, Rainwater has at times built a shaky alliance with Dutton, who is determined to protect his family’s land from the Broken Rock tribe — the original inhabitants of the land his family is on — as well as other encroaching forces.
In addition to confrontations, the two leaders have also had to figuratively join hands against other threats — a power dynamic Birmingham credits Sheridan and the series with as showing a Native character on the same level as a non-Native one.
“Rainwater and Mo are being portrayed as equals and not peripheral characters that are powerless,” he said. “They’re in the arena, as it were, with the life challenges and the issues, Native issues, that have to be addressed.”
Given the way Native characters have been portrayed onscreen throughout Hollywood’s history — the “bloodthirsty warrior” or “needy indigent” — Birmingham said Sheridan’s respectful inclusion of modern Native characters is more than a step up.
“That’s ultimately the challenge is to have people see the Native people as human beings and not the way they’ve been portrayed for the last couple hundred years,” he said.
It’s the “complexity” and “complicated nature” of Rainwater that the actor, who also starred in Sheridan’s 2017 film Wind River, about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, told Yahoo Entertainment that he’ll remember most about his character.
“[Rainwater is] presented in terms of a Native character in present-day time and a character that embodied intelligence and agency and leverage and, you know, playing the colonist’s mind game, and how to achieve the same goals that, for different reasons, that John Dutton had as well.”
That push and pull with Costner’s Dutton will be slightly different in the final six episodes after the Horizon: An American Saga director and star announced his official exit from the series in June.
Birmingham noted that because Rainwater “was written to have maybe one scene a season with [Dutton],” Costner’s absence “didn’t change a whole lot” for his character.
As the series comes to a close, Birmingham said he will miss “the people that we got to spend seven years with, and all the camaraderie and the relationships and memories and great times that we’ve had.”
Many of those memories center on Native stories, ones that he said were told “respectfully” and meant to stir the “curiosity and interest of people who want to learn and see us as human beings.”
When it comes to telling more authentic Native stories, Birmingham called out “the need to develop more Native writers and directors and actors” who can tell them.
“Until that point in time,” he said, “I hope what we can appreciate is the importance of having alliances, in the way of John Dutton and Rainwater.”
Yellowstone Season 5, Part 2 premieres Nov. 10 at 8 p.m. ET on Paramount Network and 10 p.m. ET on CBS.
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