Not too long ago, Killers of the Flower Moon star (and Best Actress Oscar nominee) Lily Gladstone unloaded on Taylor Sheridan while calling Yellowstone “deplorable” and “delusional” regarding its authenticity, portrayal of violence against Indigenous people, and overall tendency toward cowboy myth-making. Similar criticism has greeted the Forrest Gump-disliking TV creator after Sheridan announced that writing and producing 71 shows isn’t enough work for him, so he will return to movies with Empire of the Summer Moon.
The film will adapt S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe and will chronicle how a pioneer woman’s mixed-blood son (Quanah Parker) rose as the final and most celebrated chief of the Comanche tribe. In doing so, the book also wades through forty years of clashes between the Comanche people and white settlers, and as quoted by Yahoo!, several Native voices do not think that the prolific Yellowstone head honcho is the guy for the gig:
“I rolled my eyes so hard, they almost popped out of my face,” Lakota actress/writer Jana Schmieding, who starred on the Peacock series Rutherford Falls, told Yahoo Entertainment. “It’s laughable that he continues to think that he’s the right person for this job… He shoots on his own ranch. And he uses his own horses. You know, he’s really making a dime off of our stories,” Schmieding added.
Schmieding is joined by Dark Winds actor Kiowa Gordon, who believes, “I think Taylor should stay out of Indian country.” Comanche artist (and descendent of Quanah Parker) Nocona Burgess added, “A big ‘ugh.’ And ‘here we go again” while admitting his initial response to the news. This reaction sources not only to what Gladstone alleged about Yellowstone but also to a recent Hollywood Reporter profile of Sheridan, in which he declared that his Wind River film “actually changed a law, where you can now be prosecuted if you’re a U.S. citizen for committing rape on an Indian reservation, and there’s now a database for missing murdered Indigenous women.”
As Pajiba detailed, however, Native actors took umbrage with Sheridan’s claim that his film had more of an effect on that law than, as Native TV writer Kelly Lynne D’Angelo pointed out, “a 30-year long Native-led movement.”
It should be noted that Yellowstone and Lawmen: Bass Reeves star and Oglala Lakota actor Mo Brings Plenty does vociferously defend Sheridan in the aforementioned Yahoo! article while declaring, “I’ve worked with Taylor for a number of years, and so I trust Taylor deeply, and I know that [the Comanches’] story and their culture, mainly their culture, and their language is in great hands.” Still, the controversy isn’t likely to fade ahead of Empire of the Summer Moon production.
(Via Yahoo!, Hollywood Reporter & Pajiba)
Source: https://uproxx.com/movies/taylor-sherican-empire-of-the-summer-moon-controversy/