Evening on the Mescalero Reservation in southern New Mexico, at the 2011 Sundance Institute Native Lab. I took a walk in the dark, and a small fire burned in the distance, where a ceremony was occurring. It all felt familiar, like being back in southern Oklahoma at the Comanche Homecoming Powwow.
But I was in New Mexico, workshopping my screenplay, a romantic comedy called Rugged Guy. At the same time, I was experiencing culture, walking, observing, feeling that I was in a special place, physically and spiritually.
All the screenwriters there were Indigenous, and this ceremony was very much a part of our creative process — a reminder that we gather our stories from a place deep within ourselves. I learned about plot from Joan Tewkesberry, who’d written scripts with Robert Altman. Taika Waititi gave me wildly hilarious notes, ideas I’d never even thought of. I talked about tornadoes with fellow Oklahoman Sterlin Harjo. And I drove back home to Albuquerque at the end of the week to begin making my short film. Fourteen years later, I’m still at work, stubbornly continuing to make films.
This year, the 2025 Sundance Institute Native Lab was held at the Picuris Pueblo-owned Hotel Santa Fe in Santa Fe, where the Native Lab relocated in 2015. Indigenous program director Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk) hosted four new Native Lab fellows and two artists in residence.
A local Pueblo elder, Barbara Gonzalez, the grandmother of recent Native Lab alum, Charine Pilar Gonzales (San Ildefonso Pueblo), gave the opening blessing. She spoke about being courageous in your art and finding your own voice. Every artist, she said, will have something different and special to offer the world, something that only they can provide.
In the years since I was a Native Lab fellow, the program’s focus has shifted from short films to more longform projects. After 2020, it pivoted to supporting feature films and episodic pilots, a move that coincided with a remarkable Indigenous TV explosion.
Every artist, she said, will have something different and special to offer the world, something that only they can provide.
“It wasn’t timed like this, but it just sorta ended up lining up like this,” Piron said. Shows like Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds proved that a full-fledged Indigenous TV industry was already being created. The capacity for Indigenous episodic productions was there, and Sundance needed to support it with a new generation of Indigenous writers and producers.
One morning, the fellows gathered around a large wooden table covered with coffee cups and scattered pages to experience what it was like to have their scripts read out loud by their peers. Parts were assigned to the other fellows, artists in residence and advisors. Even the staff was pulled in to read action lines or small roles; everyone in attendance was fair game to be given a part.
A variety of pieces were being workshopped. Isabella Dionne Madrigal (Cahuilla/Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) was working through her mystery thriller about a woman searching for her missing sister. Alex Nystrom (Ojibwe) had a psychological drama, while Jordan Waunch (Metis) was smoothing out a draft of his Indigenous futurism sci-fi film.
But on this particular day, fellow Jared Lank (Mi’kmaq) — who recently premiered a short film, Bay of Herons, at Sundance — was the first to jump into the breach.
“I spent the last year writing the script, and being able to read it with the group was like the beginning of the next phase of the project, the next chapter in my life,” Lank said. Like all the fellows and artists in residence, he was ready for it, assigning parts to everyone like a pro — though Lank himself, like other fellows, was forbidden to read a part in the piece he’d written. His assignment was to observe how the script flowed.
“I spent the last year writing the script, and being able to read it with the group was like the beginning of the next phase of the project, the next chapter in my life.”
For the next hour and a half, his script — a historical drama set in the 1700s and titled Forerunner — was read by the group, with some taking their parts extremely seriously and others reading in a more restrained, less dramatic fashion. People laughed, and the creative tension in the room lifted. “As soon as we were done with the read, I already had thoughts on how I wanted to change some stuff up,” Lank told me afterward.
Since 2011, when I was a fellow, the Native Lab has evolved, Piron said. Today it concentrates on embracing and supporting 2025’s new multihyphenate, multilayered Indigenous artists. Applicants to the Lab are no longer just up-and-coming aspiring filmmakers.
Witness this year’s fellows: One directs a storytelling nonprofit. Another is an accomplished visual artist, and a third is acting in television shows. Recognizing this, Piron has aligned Native Lab accordingly.
“You just meet an Indigenous artist where they’re at and see what you can do to help them,” he said.
Sabrina Saleha (Diné), an actor whose credits include TV shows like The Cleaning Lady, Barry and the mini-series Echo, was one of two artists in residence this year. In addition to attending each fellow’s cold reads, Saleha was working on her own script and getting set to premiere a short film at Oklahoma’s deadCENTER film festival this summer. Her film, Legend of Fry-Roti: Rise of the Dough, is a comedy that explores her own unique background: Saleha is “Indian” on both sides of her family — Navajo and Bengali.
The fellows told me how Sundance follows up its promise to support Indigenous filmmakers with real action. Over enchiladas at a local restaurant, artist-in-residence and experimental filmmaker Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Even) — who is getting her Ph.D. at Harvard — explained that she was there to learn more about conventional narrative structures. The Lab was giving her room to experiment. “I hope to figure some shit out,” she said between bites of tortilla chips.
Lank said the Lab sought to boost artists on whatever path they chose. “Everyone from the Sundance team has been very supportive of us pursuing our own individual paths and not conforming to one idea of a Native Lab fellow,” he said. “In my work as an artist, I’m very interdisciplinary.”
Waunch said he appreciated being given the room to experiment in a space that was reserved for an Indigenous approach. “I felt really at home. Sometimes I’ll end up in a creative circle up (in Canada), up North, and I may be the only Indigenous person there. I might spend a whole creative session just explaining who I am and where I come from. And I don’t have to do that at Sundance.” He laughed.
“I don’t want to make it pan-Indigenous or say we all have the same experience, but we have a shared connection and understanding.”
He added: “There’s a lot of things that don’t have to be explained.”
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