Queer Indigenous screen representation: beyond a gift from the past or a problem to be solved

Abstract

Indigenous characters on screen have often been positioned as a gift from the past with innate heroic characteristics, or a problem to be solved in the form of the sad Indigenous person who cannot rise above colonial rule. That these archetypes are framed as positive in their representation is at odds with the need to have representations of the complexity of First Nations peoples. With queer Indigenous representation, characters become reduced to type, frequently reduced to representations of belligerence and difference, or unsubtle complexity that would be challenged in a non-Indigenous queer character. In this article and through the findings of our project Queer As . . ., we argue that this results in fewer Indigenous characters named as queer, we discuss some of the difficulties of casting and being cast as these characters, and we interrogate how the presence of queer Indigenous characters can deliver a more complete retelling of the world.

Indigenous characters on screen have been positioned as a gift from the past demonstrating innate heroic characteristics (Moreton, 2023a), or a problem to be solved in the form of a tragic Indigenous person unable to rise above the trappings of colonial rule (Moreton, 2023b). That these archetypes are framed as positive representations is at odds with the need to demonstrate the complexity of First Nations peoples (Hickling-Hudson, 1990; Kelada & Clark, 2019; Moreton, 2016).

With queer Indigenous representation, characters become even more reduced to type, frequently demonstrating representations of difference or unsubtle simplicity (Estrada, 2014; Kasdan & Tavernetii, 2011) that would be challenged in a non-Indigenous queer character. In this article, we argue that this could result in fewer Indigenous characters named as queer even when their queerness is otherwise implied. We discuss some of the difficulties of casting and being cast as these characters, the power of agency in that casting, and in the writing of the characters. Finally, we interrogate the ways in which the presence of queer Indigenous characters can deliver a more complete retelling of Indigenous peoples and communities, and thus, the world.

The authors of this article span generations and cultural backgrounds across so-called Australia. Blakers and Miller are settler graduate students in their twenties, Reardon-Smith is a settler postdoc in their mid-thirties, and O’Sullivan is a senior Wiradjuri (an Aboriginal Nation, central New South Wales, Australia) professor in their late fifties. They are all working on the Queer As . . . audit housed in the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures, located in so-called Australia. It was across a backdrop of seeking out representation that avoids stereotype that the research inquiry Queer As . . . was formed by the lead author. Their experience growing up queer and Indigenous in the 1960s to 1980s framed their need for representation and an emerging inquiry into whether this experience was shared, along with the impact of a dearth of accurate or complex representation.

The audit initially began in 2019 to 2020 as a database of queer and Indigenous representation onscreen, developed from a mapping of absences and reductive stereotype in onscreen representation. Drawing on revered Black intellectual, Marion Wright Edelman’s “you can’t be what you can’t see” (Young, 2018, p. 992) that speaks of representation, the intention was both to understand the representation that exists, and to provide a way of thinking about screen representation and the meaning this representation holds for invested audiences. In exploring ideas of absence, it also drew from Gerbner’s idea of symbolic annihilation and the impact of absence for marginalised communities (O’Sullivan, 2022). The audit posits infinite conclusions that characters and people and representations can be queer, or queer as, with an ellipsis forming an unknown completion to the sentence of who and what is being represented.

Queer as . . . bury or cancel your . . . queers?

There is an urgent need for multiple studies on the capacity of the TV and film industry to represent complex diversities. Even as there has been a steady increase in diverse racial and queer characters across television, there has also been an acknowledgement that queerness is held to different standards in the television industry. In 2022, there was an outcry on social media and in op-eds from the LGBTIQA+ community on the cancellation of a number of queer-focused TV series. Many hashtags on social media calling out this phenomenon indicated that the primary concern was on the representation of sexuality rather than gender in the concern for complexity being represented (Clements, 2022; Riedel, 2022). This is sometimes represented in the language; for instance, in the 2016 Bury Your Gays movement there was an outcry on the large number of gay characters that were killed off on prime-time TV (Bridges, 2018). It is important to note that queer characters were lumped into a single category that didn’t describe them all: some were trans and not also gay. This phenomenon was followed in 2022 by the #BuryYourGays, #CancelYourLesbians, and #WLW hashtags on social media. Both the 2016 and the 2022 cases represented a concern that mainstream shows with queer characters—again, often queer in gender as well as sexuality—in the lead were being cancelled. At the same time, the Indigenous-led and focused show, Reservation Dogs (2021–2023), that has a complex gender representation in several of its key characters (The Red Nation, 2022), was renewed for a third season with little resounding celebration, in spite of what it represented in the continued opportunity for complex, diverse representation. But can we really expect individual viewers to care about complex representation or to understand the broad possibilities that it delivers? Can we expect them to advocate for groups to which they do not belong (Heiss, 2021)?

This issue of complexity of identity, from characters who are queer and Indigenous, or queer and people of colour, or even where genderqueer, trans, or non-binary characters of any cultural or ethnic background are co-opted into language usually associated with sexuality, has led us to ponder if Queer As . . . presents an opportunity to understand some of the investments and needs of both diverse and non-diverse audiences in Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. Later in the article, we’ll revisit why these distinctions are also difficult in a landscape of representation, as Kanien’kehà:ka (a First Nation, southeastern Canada and northern New York State, USA; also known as Mohawk), actor Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs and Plains Cree from the Muskeg Lake First Nation actor Michael Greyeyes have articulated a role for Indigenous actors in minimising harm, not just in the accuracy of representation (Greyeyes, 2008; Logo, 2021).

Narrowed and expanded: a deep dive into complex representation

The background to Queer As . . . is complex and focused on representation of gender, sexuality, Indigeneity and other intersecting complexities. In 2020, substantial funding was secured from the Australian Research Council in the form of a 4-year Future Fellowship in a programme called Saving Lives. The programme, staffed by the authors of this article, comprises component projects in service of mapping the impact of queer Indigenous representation, with Queer As . . . a deep dive into representation on TV forming a central part of this work. During the development of Queer As . . . audit, we narrowed to focus to TV rather than other screen forms for a few reasons. The first is the capacity for the development of long-form characters, whose arc has potential for greater complexity through the time they spend onscreen. In addition, television represents a relatively accessible availability, while noting that subscription services have limited access to these forms. Television has a long history of entering our homes and allowing individuals and families to engage and learn diverse worlds outside of their own, and despite other forms of screen-based engagement, still represents a high volume of drama and story-based representations. For Indigenous viewers, we were interested in the impact of learning of local and international queer Indigenous representation across this accessible form.

As we were reminded during the mapping stage that impact often crosses the boundaries of race to form meaningful representation, we also expanded our approach to this issue (Dixon et al., 2019). Meaningful representation is best explained by a comment from an audience member at a 2022 forum discussing Queer As . . . . We asked the viewers the question: Have you ever seen yourself represented on screen? Although we asked to a general audience, we held particular interest in responses from queer Indigenous viewers. Their responses speak of the complexity of how individuals see themselves reflected in the long-form of TV characters. This audience member said that the visibility and what unfolded for a specific character made them feel more seen and was predicated on an arc that began with an assumption that the character was straight, followed by the unfolding of their queerness. They talked about seeing this character and feeling immediately that they were “like me”.

The audience member was a young Indigenous person in so-called Australia in 2022, and they were describing the character of Max in the TV series, A League of Their Own (2022). Max is a fictional African American character from the outskirts of Chicago, and their experience is that of a Black person in 1943 (Jackson, 2022). But for that audience member, complex representation existed in that character, and it did not require a full alignment for them to see themselves. Representation matters, so in contemplating this movable feast of complex queer characters onscreen and how they might assist in providing resonance, if not representation, in addition to narrowing the scope to focus on the serialised TV form, we extended this idea of representation to reflect feedback we are hearing in the currently underway surveys of audiences.

Many Indigenous people are used to recalibrating expectations around representation (Greyeyes, 2008). In so-called Australia, the connection to Black culture in the USA is long-standing, from the support and outcry of the Black Panthers when they visited in the 1970s (Trometter, 2015), to a generation earlier in the protest and support of singer Paul Robeson (Curthoys, 2010). The connection was fundamentally about skin colour and subjugation. Both the Black Panthers and Paul Robeson knew racism, exclusions, and control. They could see the similarity in circumstances when they visited Australia decades apart. This resonance with Black people from the USA has continued, and that connection is powerful. The lead author recalls their family, so desperate for Black representation in this continent, gathering around the TV to watch Good Times (1974–1979), a show focused on a family living in a public housing project in Chicago. That representation reflected different and not so different economic and political struggles, founded in racism and coloniality. The long-form and availability of TV series sets it apart from other screen forms, like film. We see in television the capacity to take characters on a many-hours arc of discovery that is largely unavailable in film (Mittell, 2015). A League of Their Own’s Max can unfold across an arc that includes, but is not limited to, queerness and race, all across a TV series set in the 1940s, that has no fewer than 16 named queer characters in its first season (Graham et al., 2022).

Representation can be direct and can engage a kind of mirroring or nearness of experience. Indigenous people in this continent also have a connection to First Nations peoples from across the globe, and not only through the shared experience of colonial violence, but through an appreciation for the resistances, insistences, and diversity of relational practices, allowing for the complexity of other First Nations’ experience. The expansion of the Queer As . . . audit, therefore, was necessary to ensure that we were not only including Indigenous people from this continent, but further abroad. While expanding to include other Indigenous people, the questions shifted from a fundamental idea that representation matters, to a more complex rendering of the question that asks how, and why, it matters. What did that audience member see in the character of Max that gave their whole self a sense of representation? Despite a span of 80 years, a different cultural background, a vastly differing geography, representation was still available to them. For this reason, the work is broadened to include all complexities of race and culture that accompany queer representation, while still drawing focus on the complexities of Indigenous queer representations.

The origins of this article and the Queer As . . . audit that it describes, began over 50 years ago when the lead researcher was looking to queer representations on TV to fill an absence of discussion across their family and friends. If Good Times was a resonant hit across their family in showing a near-representation, there were no queer and Indigenous characters present, and the only queer characters were presented as cautionary tales and over-sexualised stereotypes (Parsemain, 2019). By the 1980s the emergence of the AIDS and HIV epidemic led to negative attitudes towards queer people resulting in subsequent changes across programming and a particular sympathetic queer character was formed (Capsuto, 2020). In these renderings, queer people, often gay men, would be cast as the tragic figure or as bearing the burden of a trauma narrative—a trope that continues to entangle with representations of queerness (Caprioglio, 2021). This is a familiar trope to Indigenous people—queer or not—the idea of the noble savage is one that is formed from a sense of loss and impotent fatalism (Peters-Little, 2003).

From a lack of representation, through to stereotype, all the way to cautious inclusion, we began Queer As . . . with a review of several hundred TV series with what we have framed as complex queer characters by using the narrowing lens of complexities we have detailed here. Race and queer complexities are subjective, but our framing is Indigenist in approach (Day, 2020), beginning with Indigenous people and radiating out to other queer people of colour, in particular those whose lives have been impacted by colonisation. We see a direct connection to the impact that their representation has on Indigenous peoples, but also, we understand that these connections can be meaningful to audiences. On undertaking this first stage, we discovered some important elements that needed to be parsed so that we were not slipping into the reductiveness we observed in the tweeting of #BuryYourGays and #CancelYourQueers. To centre those at the margin, we began by focusing on an understanding of underrepresented groups and the tropes and opportunities that TV representation delivered.

Ace representations and unnamed queer representation: how do we see the unnamed?

While we know that at times a character’s queerness is told to them by another character, this is most true for asexual characters, whose sexuality is sometimes neither demonstrated nor told. In DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (2016–2022), the Latinx character of Esperanza Cruz, played by Lisseth Chavez, comes out as asexual (Maala et al., 2022). As with many asexual characters, their sexuality is told to them by another character (Brotto & Yule, 2017), and this also provides an opportunity to explain to the audience what it means to be asexual. In this instance, they explain that asexuality is sometimes known as ace, and their experience has a name and is a shared experience. Ongoing discussions about both the significance of accurate representation (Brotto & Yule, 2017) and a broader issue of whether asexuality belongs in the framing of queerness (Cranney, 2017; Dawson et al., 2018; MacInnis & Hodson, 2012) are important, but these discussions often forget other complexities, like race (Brown, 2022). What does it mean to an audience—or to the character development—that Spooner is both ace and Latinx?

How we understand representation is often made more complex by creatives who also experience complexity (Blais-Billie, 2021). The director of the episode, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, is both Black and queer. Across this series, the character reveals an awareness that their time-travelling will mean that they face a social barrier formed by their race and ethnicity. The addition of ace-ness, rather than presented as a problem, becomes an additive approach in making the character complex. This particular deep dive delivered a better understanding of some of the difficulties in reviewing material at large, and why singular deep dives matter.

The Annenberg Foundation study (Smith et al., 2018) includes a survey pointing to a fundamental issue; while the study only explores gender in the binary, like many studies they focus on the discernible. But by whom is it discernible? We became interested in this idea of discernability and who does the discerning. It is reasonable to assume that it matters to an audience, but discernability also requires a level of agreement and proficiency, and audiences sometimes need to build this over time while challenging stereotypes they understand. Actor and scholar, Michael Greyeyes talks about this in relation to the way that, in his words, Plains Indians are often cast as the quintessential Native person (Greyeyes, 2008), thus erasing the complexity for an audience in the diversity of Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. How does this grow a better understanding of discernability of the complexity of Indigenous people, or can it lead to further stereotyping and narrowing?

Johnston-Guerrero and Combs (2023) argue that what they frame as mixedness of racial and ethnic identity on television is rarely understood by communities outside of the culture represented. Instead, it presents a perceived risk for producers in raising questions, rather than answers, to the complexity of identity. They propose that mixedness when inserted into an otherwise non-diverse show, becomes an opportunity—or foil—for a discussion about race rather than to show complexities. They prosecute a case that while mixed race, culture, and community representation exists—whether plot device or not—it has rarely been written about and seems invisible to many who are engaging in analysis. As a part of Queer As . . . we have had to contemplate why this is the case, and to use Johnston-Guerrero & Combs’ treatise to understand the inherent complexity, rather than breaking characters into their component complexities. In doing so, the impression of audience matters. Like the Indigenous person at the forum who posed meaning in representation that we—as a team—could not have contemplated, we need to know more from an audience perspective.

The Lovecraft Country problem

As the Queer As . . . survey requests long-form answers to discuss impact and effect, we seek to understand not just the complexity of representation on screen, but what it means in the lived experience of viewers. We want to understand if it matters when representation is entirely matched. We also need to understand if, in this cultural production of Indigenous complexity, we can rely on resistances brought forth by other cultural groups that might miss the mark.

In the mainstream fantasy-history TV series, Lovecraft Country (2020), we see active resistance grounded in the literal voices—as voice-over—of critical race scholars from across the 20th century (Wyatt, 2022). The showrunner, Misha Green, created a space in which Black pasts and futures are retold and rewritten even as they apply a fantastical and positively charged introduction to critical race studies in practice (Wyatt, 2022). When the same, mostly Black, writing team created a queer Indigenous character—Yahima Maraokoti—they sought to show complexity and diversity of experience. But the casting, the story, and the historiography of the Arawak (an Indigenous peoples of South America and the Caribbean) character had several issues.

The production casted a cisgender Indigenous person from an entirely different geographic area, Monique Candelaria, who described herself as Mescalero Apache (a Native American tribe, New Mexico, USA), Aztec (an Indigenous people of central Mexico), and European descent from New Mexico, while the character of Yahima Maraokoti is Arawakan. While noting Greyeyes’ concern about authenticity and complexity of Indigenous representation (2008), he also argues that Indigenous actors playing other kinds of Indigenous characters can still feel empowering. But there are factors when it comes to representing other complexities. While there has been substantial concern over cisgender people playing transgender characters (Feder & Juhasz, 2020; Quinowski, 2022), in Lovecraft Country the casting of a cisgender Indigenous person to play someone who was framed as Two-Spirit from a different area caused concern for a number of reasons.

However, it is the character themselves that presents the largest barrier to accurate representation. Yahima names themself as Two-Spirit, they then reveal their body as if it demonstrates their Two-Spirit identity, and we see a penis and breasts: an Indigenous body revealed, to demonstrate proof of their assertion of being Two-Spirit. Two-Spirit is a term that can mean any part of the LGBTIQA+ spectrum. Body parts are not a revelation of Two-Spirit identity. It is difficult to know whether those involved in crafting this representation understood the difference between someone who is intersex, transgender, or may be both. Their use of the term Two-Spirit allowed them to play with this as it is an inclusive term; however, the term also presents two functional problems: it was not coined until 1990 (Fiola, 2020) and Lovecraft Country is set in the 1950s with the character—who uses the term to describe themselves—coming from an earlier century.

The other problem is more complex. The character is immediately coded with she and her pronouns and continues to be described in this way for the minutes before her grisly though inevitable Indigenous death, coming just as joy was possible. Yet there is no sense from the character themselves of how they perceived their gender, this continues to be an imposed idea based on the desire of the other characters. In this way it recalls the Annenberg Foundation report’s idea of the discernible but here, becoming the decided, based not on the complexity of the person, but on their presentation. The actor who plays Yahima is not Two-Spirit, nor specifically intersex. They are cisgender. Meanwhile, in an interview, this actor—Monique Candelaria—uses the pronouns ze and zir for her character (Not A Gossip Girl, 2020). While we cannot be sure whether the character of Yahima maps onto the contemporary conceptualisation of intersex, zir naked body when shown with pronounced breasts and a penis, for which Candelaria wore a prosthesis, presents a largely inaccurate imagining of intersex variations, and more in the realm of fantasy (Deshane, 2019). The other characters present in the room—Tic, Letitia, and Montrose—express greater shock at the sight of Yahima’s body parts than zir reanimation from decomposed corpse to fleshed, living human. As intersex scholar Hil Malatino (2019) has observed, bodily legibility under the colonial gaze has relied on its opposite, casting intersex bodies as “impossible objects” (p. 4), an abject spectre called forth as a subject of fascination, repulsion, and disavowal.

Representations of the intersex body on screen are virtually non-existent, with the exception of medical dramas in which they are presented as a bizarre and unusual problem, afflicted with a pathology in need of fixing (Amato, 2016). Such representations are often stigmatising, and inconsiderate of the significant medical trauma experienced by many intersex people, subjected to correctional or conversion surgeries as infants, or pressured into such surgeries during puberty and early adulthood. Sean Saifa Wall (Sharman, 2021) identifies how as a Black intersex person the state and its institutions have harmed both his body and his family, linking these two kinds of institutional, state-sanctioned violence against Black and intersex peoples. This constitutes a key issue for all representations of complex identities on television. Do they become foils for difference? Do intersex, trans, Two-Spirit people, or other queer Indigenous people only exist to become tropes and plot twists?

The portrayal of Yahima stands in stark contrast to other depictions of queerness throughout Lovecraft Country that are explored largely as a resistance to Whiteness and White values. Such radical queer resistance to heteronormative whiteness is especially evident when the character Hippolyta explores expansive identities and experiences having passed through a portal into other possible realities (Green et al., 2020). More complicated queerness is explored through the sexual entanglement of Leticia’s sister Ruby with White sorcerer Christina, and the sexual desire hinted at in the friendship between two Korean women working as nurses for the US army stationed in their country, Ji-Ah and Young-Ja. Christina seduces Ruby at first by posing as a man by magically wearing the skin of her deceased lover William, and later, when her identity is revealed and both she and Ruby recognise developing feelings, she enters the relationship as herself. In an entirely different manifestation of queerness, and on a different continent, Ji-Ah and Young-Ja are both outsiders who harbour secret lives—Ji-Ah is a gumiho, in a form based loosely on the Korean malevolent nine-tailed fox of the same name, possessing monstrous tentacles that emerge during sex to devour the souls of men; Young-Ja is a communist spy reporting on the US troops. While they do not explicitly reveal their secrets to one another, they understand enough to recognise in one another a queer kind of kinship, before Young-Ja admits to spying and is killed.

The protagonist, Tic, takes the audience through the journey as a Black post-Korean War veteran finding their place back home in an unchanged Jim Crow world, filled with both literal and figurative monsters. The show centres on the discoveries that their outer and inner world is more complex than they had imagined. In light of that, we meet Tic’s father Montrose’s struggles with his queerness, having faced the violence of homophobia. He chooses life by rejecting his queerness and externalising the pain of this internal death by repeating the patterns of abusive parenting he himself was subject to. He is not able to live openly in his queer identity until he perceives his life to be somewhat over. When Montrose chooses to violently end Yahima’s life, it is portrayed as an entanglement of his own internalised queerphobia and his determination to protect Tic from the truth of his ancestry and the violent, White supremacist magic his investigative path is revealing to him. The creator and showrunner of Lovecraft Country acknowledged that she handled Yahima’s character arc poorly, stating that her intention was “to show the uncomfortable truth that oppressed folks can also be oppressors” but that she failed to sufficiently examine Yahima’s portrayal (Sanders, 2020, para. 3).

Representation matters: in front of or behind the camera?

In the implications of casting, to cast an Indigenous person as an Indigenous character is not enough to ensure that all other aspects are correct, they are not dramaturg or cultural interpreter. Should Candelaria both know and have a right to reply on the mistakes that Lovecraft Country made with Yahima? What responsibility and expectations does that place on an actor? Particularly when actors who are Indigenous, queer, and people of colour are marginalised can be in precarious employment, wearing the financial impacts of making decisions that may change their contract or erase their character entirely. While Michael Greyeyes discusses the subtle influence that Indigenous actors have in nudging the lived experience across otherwise problematic texts (Greyeyes, 2008), this is also not explicitly the job of the actor.

Alfred L. Martin Jr., in discussing the inclusion of transgender people in the FX Productions TV series Pose (2018–2021), proposes an ecosystem that they describe as “defensive truth” (Martin, 2020, p. 71), where casting or inclusion of complex identities alone becomes enough for asserting the representation of other complex identities. Martin (2020) argues that these pre-emptive strategies allow productions a licence to not be held up to scrutiny, since the casting effectively signs-off characters and their storylines as “truth” (p. 73). Is it enough to have a queer Indigenous character in a show, or even as writers or directors? In the case of Pose, a series with a focus on Black trans lives, Martin (2020) asks whether the presence of trans people in the writing room can actually stop a further, nuanced discussion in its tracks. Greyeyes (2008) also writes about the cultural risk involved for Indigenous actors who are playing poorly written characters or at worst, racist stereotypes. He argues that they often do unpaid work in fixing these mistakes but bear the responsibility when they do not have sufficient agency to effect change.

Queerness is managed quite differently in the Indigenous-made show Reservation Dogs. During Season Two, where lead character, Elora Danan’s grandmother is dying, we see the character of Willie Jack, played by Alexis Nakota Sioux (Treaty 6 First Nation, Alberta, Canada) actor Paulina Alexis being quizzed by the Aunties on whether they had a boyfriend or a girlfriend (Harjo et al., 2022). Rather than being drawn out, Willie Jack answers no to both. Queerness is just there, present and available to be engaged or ignored. As queer Kumeyaay (an Indigenous Nation, Baja California, Mexico, and California, USA) screenwriter and executive story editor of both seasons of Reservation Dogs Tommy Pico points out (The Red Nation, 2022), representation in this sense is not just an opportunity for audiences to see complex, non-stereotyped Native characters, but also for those behind the camera and behind the scenes. Many of the actors in the series have previously been cast as stereotypically “stoic Indian” (The Red Nation, 2022, 37:18) characters, or as Pico says, to “have to be sad and wounded and bloody and dying or corpses or falling off of horses” (The Red Nation, 2022, 38:17). In Reservation Dogs, these same actors were able to be funny and playful, and authentically themselves. In conversation with Pico, Diné (an Indigenous nation, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, USA; also known as Navajo) scholar Melanie Yazzie affirms that there is a lot at stake in Indigenous representation: “Native people are really judgy about how we’re represented, because we’re rarely represented, and honestly when we are it’s very one dimensional and it’s just racist, and that’s just the goddamn truth” (The Red Nation, 2022, 28:36).

The desires to see complexity in representation and to witness the truth of Indigenous lives are central to the reflections of many of those involved in Reservation Dogs. Queer Kanien’kehà:ka actor Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, who plays Elora Danan, talks about a dream of queer representation being available: “I would love to witness, like, a Two-Spirit, Indigi-queer rom-com happen at some point. That’s just something that I would, personally, love to see as an audience member” (Logo, 2021, 3:33). She emphasises that “positive representation of queer Indigenous folks is harm reduction” (Logo, 2021, 0:00) and describes her wonder at entering the Reservation Dogs set: “in the writer’s room, with all of the directors, all of the core cast, and then when I looked around, in almost every department, there were Indigenous crew members, and I had never experienced that before” (Logo, 2021, 2:35). She recognised this as an absence in her other work. She also talked about the importance of showing queer Indigenous lives and what it meant to have never experienced it herself growing up, and her hopes for the kind of representation that Reservation Dogs brings (E! Insider, 2021).

Diving deeper: continuing Queer As . . .

While this article has primarily focused on television across Turtle Island—Indigenous name for the lands of North and Central America—the increasing presence of queer Indigenous characters and stories, along with rich multiethnic queer representations across so-called Australia and globally will form a major focus for Queer As . . . . The audit intends to move beyond a simple listing of characters, and into the deep dives found in this article, with a focus on what representation can mean, including the risks associated with negative or problematic representation. In this article we relayed the issues for representing asexuality, for understanding the risk of misinformation and sensationalism around including an intersex character.

As we hear back from participants in our survey and form an online space to explore the tag line of a deep dive into complex queer representation on TV, we investigate these areas further. Across so-called Australia, there is a richness of inclusion of queerness across Indigenous-developed and written projects, from Steven Oliver’s writing and performance of queerness in Black Comedy (2014–2020), to the multiple queer characters in All My Friends Are Racist (2021), to storylines focused on queer Indigenous lives in Redfern Now (2012–2015), and in the 2022 reboot of Heartbreak High (2022–2024). As with Reservation Dogs, these shows have Indigenous writers and directors, as well as actors, and this makes a difference. Afro-Indigenous, Cree (an Indigenous people, of primarily Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA) Métis (an Indigenous people of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada, that has mixed Canadian Aboriginal and European ancestry—usually French, English, and Scottish), actor Olivia Lucas who plays Thelma Bearkiller on the final season of Motherland: Fort Salem (2020–2022), has described that she imagined her character as queer in a role where that could only be demonstrated as internal knowledge for the actor; they were otherwise busy winning a war. When asked in an interview why they—a Black and Indigenous person—was cast in a role where their character was leading a Tribal Council, they responded by saying that their casting was intentional because someone in the writer’s room had a child who is Black and Indigenous and wanted to see people like them represented (Big Gay Energy, 2022). They were cast because, in the end, representation matters to those who have the power to gift it. That an Indigenous actor, writer, or director shows a greater complexity in their representation, in this case by effect of choosing queerness for a character, makes sense. If Indigenous characters have been made reductive as stereotypes, then it is only through an expansive view that this becomes challenged, and that is the deep dive that we anticipate will be delivered through the Queer As . . . audit.