UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) (Unintelligible) He pointed specifically to a scene in which Te Ata, played by Q'orianka Kilcher, enters a movie theater in 1920s New York and sees a cartoon depicting Native Americans as savage brutes. GIL BIRMINGHAM: Hollywood will take its licenses with characters and storylines, but it's so much more encouraging and inspiring to hear the stories told from a tribe that originated the stories from the beginning.īREWER: Director Nathan Frankowski, who is also directing the tribe's next film, "The Chickasaw Rancher," said the story of "Te Ata" itself is relevant to the current discussion about native representation in popular culture. For Birmingham, working on a film written and produced by the very tribe it portrays was a gratifying experience. It also gave her an opportunity to push back against the stereotype of indigenous peoples in Hollywood she and many Native Americans have long despised.īARBOUR: It is frustrating to see those stereotypes continue even today when we know that they are wrong yet Hollywood continues to perpetuate.īREWER: Gil Birmingham, a Comanche actor who has been in such films as "Twilight" and "The Lone Ranger," played Te Ata's father in the film. And she just commanded the room.īREWER: For Barbour, who is Chickasaw, the chance to bring the story of one of her people's greatest figures, as well as a personal hero of hers, to the big screen was exciting.
And she was decked out in this wonderful Seminole skirt. Even at her advanced age, she was just beautiful.
JEANNIE BARBOUR: She was just an elegant lady. Screenwriter Jeannie Barbour recalled that shortly after joining the Chickasaw Nation's multimedia department, she met Te Ata just before her death in 1995 at the age of 99. GRAHAM LEE BREWER, BYLINE: The film "Te Ata" begins when Mary Thompson Fisher was a little girl growing up in pre-statehood Oklahoma, before she took the stage name Te Ata and traveled the world telling the stories of native peoples. And it was produced by the Chickasaw Nation, which started a film production arm to tell its own stories, as Graham Lee Brewer reports. The film "Te Ata" tells the true story of Mary Thompson Fisher, who is considered one of the greatest Native American performers.
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