Fort McMurray Actress Alyssa Wapanatâhk shown in this undated handout photo provide by Netflix. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout-Netflix
Actors in Netflix’s upcoming “Little House on the Prairie” series say the latest adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book series was intentional about portraying its Indigenous characters with depth and avoiding the racial stereotypes that the original text has been criticized for utilizing.
Ojibwe actor Meegwun Fairbrother says the producers wanted an inclusive retelling of the novels that depict a white family settling in the American West on Osage land in the 19th century, and that they wanted to avoid any continuation of “the history of erasure of Indigenous peoples in North America.”
The semi-autobiographical books and previous screen adaptations have been criticized by scholars and Indigenous communities for their depiction of Native American characters and the way the colonial narrative is centred. Wilder’s name was removed from a children’s literature award in 2018, with the organizer, the Association for Library Service to Children, saying the “author’s legacy is complex and Wilder’s work is not universally embraced.”
The eight-episode first season, which was filmed in Winnipeg and premieres Thursday, follows the Ingalls family in the 1870s as they head west across America with the promise of “free land.” However, after settling on Osage Nation territory, they find out the U.S. government is still negotiating a land treaty and they have essentially become squatters.
The Indigenous Mitchell family is depicted as a parallel to the pioneering Ingalls family, showing their love, struggles and hardships when the settlers come.
Fairbrother says this version of “Little House” doesn’t shy away from tackling complex issues, including clashing views over land stewardship and ownership.
“It’s central to the story of what it means to share land, and to occupy a space with different cultures and people trying to get along to survive.”
Fairbrother, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Vancouver, said that over the past decade, he has noticed more films and TV shows involving Indigenous consultants to ensure stories are told from a variety of perspectives.
“If you’re going to tell a story about us, you’ve got to have us involved,” said Fairbrother, whose previous acting credits include CBC’s “Burden of Truth,” APTN’s “Mohawk Girls” and the Paramount Plus drama “Skymed,” in which he also worked as a consulting producer and supervising producer.
The “Little House on the Prairie” crew included Robert Warrior, a writing consultant; Talee Redcorn, a language consultant; and Julie Okeefe, a cultural-production consultant. Okeefe previously worked on Netflix’s Western series “American Primeval” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Fairbrother, who worked on his dialogue with Redcorn for six weeks, said as an Ojibwe actor, he had to do a lot of research to show respect and honour the Osage culture that’s depicted in the show.
“Indigenous languages are alive, there’s a magic to them, an energy and a spirit to the language. So when I started learning that, I could feel it, like literally, you know, changing my body and my outlook and the way I thought and the way I presented,” Fairbrother said in a video interview from Vancouver.
In “Little House on the Prairie,” Fairbrother plays William Mitchell, a member of the Osage Nation who acts as a bridge between the Indigenous community and the settlers who are taking over the land around him. He is a successful farmer and has built a home with his family, which includes his daughter, Good Eagle, and wife, White Sun, played by fellow Canadian Alyssa Wapanatâhk.
“I think it takes us into the perspective of what it’s like as an Osage person. We’re not only shown as this type of trope, type of character. We’re an actual person and we have a family and we are just like the Ingalls, another family on the Prairie. So I really like that aspect,” says Wapanatâhk, who is Cree from Alberta.
Executive producers Trip Friendly and Joy Gorman Wettels both said in the production notes that incorporating the Osage perspective had been a priority. Friendly took ownership of the intellectual property of “Little House” after his father passed — the elder Friendly was the original executive producer on the 1970s TV series.
Showrunner and creator Rebecca Sonnenshine also says in the production notes that the books only captured the Osage Nation “on the outside looking in,” and that her team wanted a “story that would give us insight into who they were and what they were going through, but not just as ideas: as people.”
Sonnenshine had previously worked with the streamer on the sci-fi horror show “Archive 81” and wrote and executive produced Prime Video’s “The Boys.” She also wrote the screenplay for the film “The Housemaid,” based on Freida McFadden’s book.
The Fort McMurray, Alta.-born Wapanatâhk says she also received coaching on the Osage language for the series, and that it was “super important” to have experts and Indigenous directors on set.
Sydney Freeland, who directed the Marvel TV series “Echo” for Disney plus, helmed Episodes 7 and 8, while Erica Tremblay, a writer and co-producer on FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” directed Episode 6.
“We feel protected as people that are working with stories that are real and cultures that are real, and to maintain the respect,” says Wapanatâhk, who portrayed the Indigenous princess Tiger Lily in Disney’s “Peter Pan and Wendy.”
“I remember it was around when I did ‘Peter Pan and Wendy,’ it was the first time I really started to see more people utilizing consultants, especially for culture reasons. And other than that, I was mostly the cultural consultant on all of the films that I worked on,” she said in a video interview from Kelowna, B.C.
The actress says having fellow Indigenous creatives involved made her want to do her best work.
“I think that also creates more of an environment of feeling like really grounded as an Indigenous filmmaker, creator, actor. When we work together there’s a different flow that happens. And yeah, I noticed that through all of those episodes with Sydney and with Erica.”
Fairbrother says he’s proud of the vision for the show and the nuances it captures.
“I think we were able to capture that spirit and that complexity of the time of settlers moving in — the way that land barons and government were using settlers to literally bring them into the land without, you know, maybe they didn’t even know what they were going into. And they didn’t know that they were taking over a land that belonged to another people,” he says.
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