How the Predator franchise is breaking new ground for Native Americans on screen

Would you be surprised to learn that Native Americans used toothbrushes? Or would you be more surprised to learn this from a Predator film? At the same time as giving us the usual invisible alien-inflicted butchery, Prey, the fifth and latest instalment of the franchise, delivers its first history lesson.

This lithe, primitivist reinvention takes place in 1719, when a band of Comanche find themselves becoming quarry for one of the intergalactic trophy-hunters who has turned up a few centuries too early to run into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Packed with authentic period detail (such as the Indigenous oral hygiene), it’s probably the first big-budget film about Native Americans since 1992’s Last of the Mohicans.

Representation is the kind of woke buzzword that would have had Arnie and his meathead brigade reaching for their grenade-launchers back in the 80s. And Prey doubles down by making its hero a woman. Amber Midthunder, a 25-year-old Assiniboine Sioux actor who plays lead character Naru, says that she has been selective in the past when it comes to Indigenous roles. “A different level of care goes into choosing them because often the representation is not the best, especially for people who get so little representation.” But, spaceships aside, she says Prey felt different. “For a period piece, it showed so much more cultural accuracy, instead of boiling us down to something one-dimensional, like that hyper-spiritual side or something overly violent.”

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