The concept for The Ballad of a Native Man started formulating in my brain in my first year of university, with the film’s first concept drafts coming during my first screen writing class. I like to view The Ballad of a Native Man as the thesis to my five years studying and working within both Film Production and First Nation and Indigenous Studies. I spent a lot of time within my Indigenous studies courses diving into past and present representation of Indigenous peoples in film. I always credit one book to radicalizing me when it comes to the im pacts of these historical representations.

The book Storying Violence: Unraveling Colonial Narratives in The Stanley Trial by Gina Starblanket and Dallas Hunt surrounds Colton Boushie’s murder by a white settler Saskatchewan farmer and his subsequent trial. Having grown up native in Alberta and around rodeos, the study of violence in the prairies connected so deeply with me.

The connection Starblanket and Hunt provided of past representations of ‘bountiful’ land in the prairies to modern-day violence against Indigenous people only drove me to study the topic of western representations and violence deeper. A few essays and poems came from this interest, and finally the script for what I call this contemporary Indigenous Western was born.

The Western films of early Hollywood and the iconography they produced which often depicted Indigenous characters and communities as mere obstacles to overcome or to kill or to use as an aid in feeding their heroism inspired me to rewrite the narrative form and reclaim the genre in a contemporary and authentic way. I wanted the main character to be a native man and the supporting characters to be the white-settlers. I wanted his journey to be representative of a few modern day obstacles for native men and with this comes the concept of masculinity.

I see Cody Thunderchild as the cowboy hero but not in the way you would immediately think of a cowboy hero. He doesn’t own a gun, he doesn’t react with violence, and he doesn’t have his path or confidence quite figured out yet. But he is determined, empathetic, and he is proud to be a Cree native man and that’s what makes him the cowboy hero. His drum and culture is his gun, and his family and sobriety replaces violence.

Cody Thunderchild is the kind of cowboy I want native boys and men to aspire to be.