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For example, a 2023 USC study found that 1% of roles in top-grossing films over a 16-year period had Native American characters. Less than a quarter of them were speaking roles.

Guerrero said that, looking back at cinema through the decades, there was little Native representation —  and what there was wasn’t written by Native Americans or directed by them.

Guerrero, an actor, screenwriter, producer, director and UCR professor of acting and screenwriting, is doing her part to change that.

Guerrero plays Rose, a reoccurring character in the HBO Max series that is a prequel to Stephen King‘s 1986 horror novel “It,” which has been translated to film.

She said it was a powerful opportunity for her to stand in Rose’s shoes.

The character has lived in her ancestral home in Maine all her life and is deeply linked to the history and songs of her people, Guerrero said.

“Somebody that is so intimately and powerfully connected to the land, to the water, to the air, to those who have gone before her and understanding her place in the world,” Guerrero said. “… There was an ease with playing her.”

At this point, viewers have seen the creature It, later known as Pennywise the Clown, a shape-shifting monster that has been on earth for millennia and feeds on humans in 27-year cycles. Rose, a member of the local tribe, is living through her third encounter with the creature.

Guerrero, born in Oklahoma in 1967, is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and of Salish-Kootenai descent, a 2023 UCR news release states.

Guerrero’s most well-known role came in the 1990s as Jerry’s Native American girlfriend on “Seinfeld.” In 2020, things changed when she played Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller in the Gloria Steinem biopic “The Glorias.” In 2021, she played Auntie B. in Reservation Dogs, a TV show about four Native American teens in Oklahoma.

Guerrero’s love of acting started well before she appeared on television. And she noticed the lack of diversity in the industry well before then as well.

As a child, a moment that stood out for Guerrero was watching “The Brady Bunch” at a time when the portrayal of her people was very much “cowboys and Indians,” she said.

In a popular story arc, the Brady family visits the Grand Canyon and meets a Native American boy, Jimmy Pocaya, played by Michele Campo, she said.

“It was just so liberating for me as a kid who didn’t really see anybody that looked like me on television,” Guerrero said.

The character was cool, she said, and talked like a normal kid. It was something she’d not seen before.

A 2023 report by Associate Professor of Communication Stacy L. Smith at USC and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative looked at Native American representation in 1,600 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2022.

The study examined speaking or named characters in movies to understand how Native American roles were portrayed on screen. It found that less than one-quarter of 1% of all speaking roles went to Native American characters and that Native American roles did not exceed 1% of roles available in the 16 years studied.

During that time, there was one film in which a Native actor had a leading role. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of all Native American speaking characters were inconsequential to the plot, and a third filled secondary roles, the study found.

When Native American characters did appear, more often than not they were male, at 77%. Women characters comprised 23%. In 1,581 movies of the 1,600 examined, there were no women with speaking roles. Sometimes their characters didn’t even have names.

There have been changes for Native American characters and actors in cinema, but often characters were pigeon-holed into stereotypical roles, said James Fenelon, director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies at Cal State San Bernardino.

Roles have improved, Fenelon said.

Many shows have moved away from leaning into blatant stereotypes and characters are more well-rounded and better represented. But it is still not perfect, he said.

Shows such as “Reservation Dogs,” a 2021 comedy series “blew the lid off it” and there has been a surge in Native film companies, directors and actors in the past 10 years.

Guerrero entered the industry in the 1990s after graduating from UCLA. Coming out of college, she said casting agents didn’t know what to do with her. She filled a particular “niche” as a Native American woman.

Things had progressed and characters were given more depth when she came into the industry, Guerrero said. One huge “watershed moment” came after the 1990 film “Dances with Wolves,” starring and directed by Kevin Costner. The film employed Native American actors such as Graham Greene and Rodney Grant.

“There was some really cool things happening,” Guerrero said. “The Indigenous people that I was playing were really kind of fleshed-out human beings.”

Things were moving in a positive direction, she said. At the end of the 1990s, things changed.

“Then, all of a sudden, the door closed so hard, so profoundly,” Guerrero said.

Guerrero went back to school in the 2010s. She attended UCR, earned a master of fine arts and became a professor in 2017. Guerrero said a pivotal moment was the 2016 Standing Rock protests that fought against an oil pipeline through Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lands in North Dakota.

Millions of people watched the standoff in real time. Suddenly, it was not about explaining that Native people belonged in contemporary settings and that let the proverbial horse out of the barn, she said.