Sterlin Harjo
Trailblazer Award Winner
In the current era of primetime television, amid the omnipresent cop sagas, spinoff sitcoms, and reality-TV dating shows and competitions, middle America doesn’t get much attention. The lives of native and indigenous Americans, even less. What creator, showrunner, writer, and director Sterlin Harjo has proven, first with the exemplary three seasons of the coming-of-age journey Reservation Dogs and now with the shaggy-dog neo-noir The Lowdown, is that storytelling rooted in specific places and specific communities has the same universal appeal as any formulaic procedural — but exponentially more heart.
A citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and a Mvskoke descendant, Harjo came up through the Sundance Indigenous Program before he began producing indie and short films as well as several documentaries. He was also a founding member of the 1491s, an indigenous skit comedy troupe, including several members who went on to contribute to Harjo’s TV work. Indeed, the brightest trail he has blazed are two fresh series rooted in humor, imagination, and a precise worldview that advocates for the dignity of contemporary indigenous people and nods to the historical and cultural traditions they’ve practiced for centuries.
His series, which are shot in Oklahoma and employ primarily native crew members, are portals not just to a part of America where some viewers might not have spent time, but a reminder — often political, and always thoughtful — of how much we deprive ourselves when we ignore other lived experiences. And Harjo is doing so by widening the opportunities in television available to the native community and building a network of recurring indigenous collaborators, including actors Kaniehtiio Horn, Casey Camp-Horinek, and the late Graham Greene; directors Danis Goulet, Sydney Freeland, and Tazbah Chavez; and writers Dallas Goldtooth and Ryan RedCorn.
In Harjo’s Reservation Dogs, a group of native teenagers try to decide whether they want to stay in their small town, with its myriad eccentrics and elders, or move to California, a near-mythic place where they think they’ll have more opportunities. Reservation Dogs deftly delivered deeply intimate portraits of the teens’ lives, laugh-out-loud explorations of the tensions between Okern’s native community and the white outsiders who didn’t understand them, and somber exhumations of the countless wrongs done against indigenous people. The series was always upping itself, resulting in a devastating and beautiful series finale that suggested if the kids remembered who they are and where they come from, they’d be alright.
In The Lowdown, meanwhile, Harjo casts Ethan Hawke as “truth-storian” Lee Raybon, an iconoclast muckraker and man convinced that a storied white family in Tulsa is covering up an array of sins toward the town’s native population. What Raybon stumbles upon is partially that story, but also a more ancient one, about how this country was stolen with money and blood and remains in the hands of the people who conducted that violence. The Lowdown is a story about journalism, history, truth, and the attacks on all those institutions in our recent times, but it’s also about the power one person has to make a difference. That’s a timely and timeless message, and one that Harjo has beautifully centered within his work. For expanding the possibilities of television storytelling while centering Indigenous voices with originality, humanity, and purpose, Sterlin Harjo is honored with the Peabody Trailblazer Award.