Note: This story contains some light spoilers for The Curse.
In an episode of Showtime’s new black comedy The Curse, Indigenous artist Cara Durand hosts a performance art piece during which she invites participants, one by one, into a tipi. There, she uses a meat slicer to shave pieces off a hunk of turkey and distributes the slices to participants. “As a Native person, that’s basically what you’re doing every day — just fucking slicing off pieces of yourself. And it’s exhausting,” Durand later explains.
The Curse is a series by Nathan Fielder, whose shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal have defined the cringe comedy genre, and Benny Safdie, best known for his work in the critically acclaimed film Uncut Gems. With two non-Native showrunners, The Curse might seem an unlikely contender for raising the bar on Indigenous representation. But the show, set in Española, New Mexico, touches on serious real-life issues, including gentrification, tribal sovereignty and sustainable development.
“As a Native person, that’s basically what you’re doing every day — just fucking slicing off pieces of yourself. And it’s exhausting.”
The characters parody real-world archetypes. Emma Stone leads as Whitney, a white-savior type who considers herself an ally while using her generational wealth to build eco-certified “passive homes” in poor neighborhoods. She tries to befriend a tribal governor, played by Gary Farmer, who is welcoming but skeptical. Durand, the artist, is Indigenous, but she’s also contemporary, career-driven and morally complicated: She’s contemptuous of Whitney’s aspirations but willing to sell her own Native credibility, if the price is right.
Durand is played by real-life painter and musician Nizhonniya Austin (Diné and Tlingit), who was born in Juneau, grew up in Albuquerque, and studied painting at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts. Austin recently relocated from New Mexico to Los Angeles. HCN sat down with her for a conversation about Native identity in the art world as it relates to both Austin and her character.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: You’re a Native contemporary visual artist, like your character Cara in The Curse. But how is Cara different from you?
Nizhonniya Austin: She’s a lot more cutthroat than I am. And I don’t think that she was really meant to be a particularly likable character. She kind of hides behind her identity. She has that as this safe shield for her that gives her a lot of leeway. That’s definitely something that she and I differ in. There’s something a little selfish about her, and that’s what I really try to not be.
HCN: Do you see other Native artists using Native identity as a shield? How do you avoid doing that?
NA: Oh, for sure. It’s such an easy thing to lean on. I think it’s a really fine line. If you want to choose a more authentic life, then it’s easy to not be an inauthentic person that just uses something for your gain. But it’s definitely a choice. Having a cultural identity is this really beautiful and empowering and incredible thing, but it’s something that can be used. And it’s not just Native people, it’s all different kinds of people.
Cara is one of those people who has used her identity for her own gain. In the show, I’ve always felt that, that moment that she had with Gary Farmer’s character, the governor — we’re not actually told about why she doesn’t like him —
HCN: Does she not like him?
NA: She doesn’t really care for him. There’s a hint of that in the second episode. It’s very subtly suggested. He sees through her in this way that she really doesn’t like. He is somebody that is doing things for the community, and she’s in this tipi slicing meat, being like, “I am helping my community. I am this superstar Native artist.”
HCN: Gary Farmer, whom I loved in Dead Man and Reservation Dogs, is a legendary Native character actor. What was it like working with him?
NA: I was actually very intimidated. I mean, working with Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, and Emma Stone was pretty intimidating, but I was so shy around him. Ashley Browning, who was the consulting producer on the show, was like, “He’s our Robert De Niro.” When he was on set, all the Natives were freaking out over him, including myself.
HCN: It’s hard to imagine that Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, who presumably have no experience being Native, could have written Cara themselves. Did you help write her?
NA: Not really, no. But she was crafted around me. When I first got the call to come in for an audition, I was in the room with Benny and Nathan, and they started doing improv work with me. So Nathan was interviewing me as Cara, and he asked about the meat slicing thing. And that just came out of me. That was all improv. That scene where I’m sitting down with Whitney in episode eight, when she asked about what the meat slicer really means, and I kind of dish it out to her, that was actually my words for what the meat slicer meant to me — or what I thought it meant to Cara. And then Nathan loved it so much that he put it in the script.
HCN: So that sounds like you did write that part?
NA: Yeah. I did write that part.
HCN: Cara has to decide how much she wants to be involved with Whitney’s HGTV show, lending Native credibility in exchange for a considerable amount of money. When you were in talks for The Curse, did you have a similar decision-making process?
NA: I didn’t have much doubt about playing Cara. At that point I’d met Nathan and I’d met Benny, and they seemed so sensitive to my opinion of the portrayal of Cara, and of Native representation. On top of that, I was really excited to play Cara. Even the description, when the casting agents sent it out, I was pretty blown away. I was like, “Oh, whoa, there’s gonna be a Native actress that’s playing a contemporary artist? This is such a great character that I don’t ever see anywhere.” I was just ready to play this character, because she was just a modern Native artist, living in this modern contemporary world. It sounds like such a simple thing, but that’s all Native people are asking for.
“Having a cultural identity is this really beautiful and empowering and incredible thing, but it’s something that can be used. And it’s not just Native people, it’s all different kinds of people.”
HCN: The show touches on real-life land-based issues like gentrification, tribal sovereignty and sustainable development. How closely does it reflect the reality you’ve seen in Southwestern Native communities?
NA: It reflects it pretty accurately. I spent five years in Santa Fe, and I feel like those kinds of issues are a little bit different from the Albuquerque area where I grew up. I’ve seen and experienced so much push-and-pull in the community. There’s this weird dynamic between Native artists and the white residents. And then also the white trust-fund kids who are coming in and making pottery and textiles. The attention gets wrapped around the hipster trust-fund pottery makers and takes away from the real Native artists who are actually from that land who are making pottery, making textiles. I feel like that’s represented a lot in Whitney’s character. She thinks she can just come in and build these houses, when an adobe structure is actually the most passive home that you could have. The show gave a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be a Native person living in the Southwest, with all these cultural clashes.
HCN: Cara abandons a promising art career because of “evil collectors.” Art is expensive, and it’s predominantly wealthy white folks who are able to buy it. In your life as a painter, what kind of conversations do you have with yourself about that?
NA: It’s something that I’ve always considered. There was a lot of hesitation for a couple of years where I was second-guessing the validity of doing that. I was like, oh, God, being a painter, you’re just going to be on some rich white person’s wall that’s probably like working in Los Alamos, building dangerous toxic weapons or something. Or bombs. That’s just not really why I even approached art. And it was a really sad thought that was eating at me for a bit where I was like, OK, should I even do this? Is it even worth it? There’s a lot that goes into being an artist as well — putting that mask on for wealthy people and mingling with them and pretending that you like them, just so that they could buy something and you can pay your bills. The thing that I’ve always used to validate that issue is if it’s not going to be you, out there being a Native artist, asserting the fact that you do exist, then it’ll be somebody else. And you can not be an artist, and it’ll eat you up for the rest of your life while you quietly live your life wishing that you could have been that. That’s always been my own explanation for validating what I’ve chosen to do. It’s the same for Cara’s, too.
“There’s a lot that goes into being an artist as well — putting that mask on for wealthy people and mingling with them and pretending that you like them, just so that they could buy something and you can pay your bills.”
HCN: Do you consider yourself a Native artist or just an artist?
NA: I don’t really like having to label myself in general, so I have to say both. The fact that I’m Native is also part of the conversation and part of my identity as an artist, because it is who I am, and it’s something that I feel in my very bones. I see the world very differently because that’s who I am. It’s a big part of the picture. I’m also just an artist and deserve to be acknowledged as just that as well. I’m interested in doing non-Native and Native roles. They’re both really important. We have to show Hollywood that Native people don’t need to play just Native people. We can also be some superhero, we can also be somebody living in some random city who’s having a midlife crisis. Or we can be someone who’s falling in love with a person, because that’s life, and we’re all human beings and we’re all just trying to tell our own human story.
Native visual artists and musicians Austin’s enjoying right now:
Mali Obomsawin
(Abenaki First Nation at Odana)
Experimental jazz musician
Portland, Maine
Tyrrell Tapaha (Diné)
Weaver/fiber artist
Goat Springs, Arizona
Eric-Paul Riege (Diné)
Installation sculptor
Gallup, New Mexico
Elisa Harkins (Cherokee/Muscogee)
Performance artist and musician
Tulsa, Oklahoma
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This article appeared in the May 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The mask of Native identity.”
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