The Woolworths Project, Representation, AI & National American Indian Heritage Month – Guest Column

Editor’s Note: November is National American Indian Heritage Month. The Department of the Interior’s Indian Affairs Office’s theme for 2026 is 250 Years and Beyond: Building a culture of service in Indian Country. In that context, filmmaker and TV writer Billy Luther puts his own sense of himself, his culture and his heritage in the spotlight of Hollywood 2026 and his L.A. life.

I moved to Los Angeles 25 years ago not knowing one person.

I grew up moving, mixed, an urban Native who never quite felt at home anywhere. I’m Navajo, Hopi and Laguna Pueblo. I’m gay. I’m a Papa. I’m a filmmaker, writer and director. Lately, that last part mostly means I get asked a question.

“What does representation mean to you?”

That’s the question that starts off the interviews and the panels. I pause and pretend to think, in case there are cameras in the room or on the Zoom. I have a bank account strictly for this question.

Apparently, I explain why I exist. I drink from a water bottle next to other artists who must explain why they exist too. Someone tells me to move the microphone closer so the audience can hear. My laptop is at home, waiting for me to get back to Final Draft, which is probably in need of another software update.

I understand why these conversations happen.

I agree to take part because they matter to me. I’m used to it. Sometimes an honorarium, sometimes swag as a thank you. I talk about the importance of making films more than I make them.

I’d like to talk about my work without explaining every Native person first. I want to make something with humor, something strange, without preparing a statement about what it means for representation. I guess my genre is Indigenous.

The question is how I’m supposed to pitch it.

These days, I’m exploring verticals, micro dramas, YouTube, podcasts. I’m figuring out what I can make with my Android (don’t start), the people around me, and the resources I have. I’m traveling around the country to conferences about AI and technology, asking questions, discovering apps that will be old the following month, and filming the experience. I look around those rooms and I’m usually the only brown person there.

This is the part nobody asks about on panels. What they ask about is how I got here.

The seed was planted when my parents took me to see The Color Purple (1985).

I felt something I’d never felt before. I stayed for the credits for the first time. I wanted to do that. I didn’t know what “that” was. I didn’t know what a director, a writer, a grip was. But someone had made something that hit, and I wanted to do that for other people. I didn’t leave that theater planning to someday discuss the ambition at a film festival.

Before L.A. there was New York, where I started figuring out what “that” was. I couldn’t afford to stay in film school, so I volunteered. I answered telephones, made copies and asked questions at places like the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers and Third World Newsreel. I began working my way in.

I applied to Project Involve, a mentorship program for filmmakers of color at what was then IFP and is now Film Independent. At the time only a handful of organizations were doing that work. I moved to Los Angeles because of it.

I fell into documentaries because they were the films I could afford to make.

For Miss Navajo, I borrowed a camera. But there was a script, Frybread Face and Me, that kept looking at me every time I walked into my apartment in West Hollywood. Work and life happened, but I kept returning to it. Eventually I made it.

That script led to a writers’ room on a television show.

Native actors, Native crew, Native writers. Work I cared about. The show was based on books written by a non-Native, and I found myself contributing my life to an adaptation of someone else’s version of Native life. In the room I shared experiences, memories, truth and trauma.

Things I knew and lived. Things my parents lived and didn’t talk about.

They became material for storylines. Something personal, pitched, is now something people can discuss, change or reject. One day the few Native writers in the room pushed back on a storyline. It was a heated day. The next morning everyone sat down still carrying the same energy, and the non-Native showrunner reminded us who makes the decisions on the show. He did. We were the material.

That changed everything for me.

I had worked for years to get into rooms like that. Hearing it, I understood my position in this one differently. I could contribute my experience. What happened when I disagreed about how it was being used? That’s a question I would love to hear on a panel.

During the pandemic, after George Floyd was murdered, I watched Hollywood announce its support for diversity. Statements. Commitments. The message: tell us about your perspective and why your voice matters. I had stories like that. I had been working on them before the statements.

Within a year or two the enthusiasm faded.

Now, when I pitch, I’m told to pull back on that language. Don’t talk about representation. Don’t say audiences haven’t seen this Native world before. Say those words; now don’t say those words. I can rewrite the pitch a hundred ways. The perspective underneath it is the same one you asked for in 2020. But how am I supposed to explain what’s distinctive about my story?

Film and television taught me how much depends on permission.

Someone approves the script and the budget. Years can pass in meetings on something that never gets made. I still need ideas, time, collaborators and money. But it belongs to me, and I don’t have to convince a roomful of people that I should be allowed to start.

That’s why I’m at the AI conferences. I have no interest in handing my storytelling over to AI. I want to know what these tools do, who gets access, and whether any of them are useful to someone who can’t afford what a larger production takes for granted.

Right now, a lot of these tools are free.

They won’t stay that way. When the bill comes, the people who can pay it will look a lot like the people who already run Hollywood. I’ve seen this movie. I can be curious and have objections.

That curiosity is why I’m building the Woolworths Project, a nonprofit, to bring Indigenous communities and filmmakers into conversations about AI and technology, with access to knowledge and resources that are hard to find and harder to afford. I’m learning as I go.

Los Angeles is where I found my tribe. It gave me a career, friends, a family. For years, my steadiest relationship was with the ArcLight. We never slept together. We had something, though. I always paid the bill. The city isn’t what it was when I got here. Neither is the industry. I still love it. It’s home. I can see the Hollywood sign from where I live. I don’t hike, so I will never get any closer to it. Maybe one day I’ll buy the shoes.

I’m still making work and figuring out how to make more of it. Which brings me back to The Color Purple. After the movie, I asked my dad to buy me Alice Walker’s book. He said no. We lived near a Woolworths. I saw the book on a rack and started reading. Then I went home. I’d ride my bike back and read some more. Home. Store. Home. Store.

That’s how I read The Color Purple.

I didn’t have the book, but it was always there.

I found a way.

That’s been the whole career: find a way. A borrowed camera. A script that waited twenty years. There’s a reason I’m calling it the Woolworths Project.

“What does representation mean to you?” I’ve spent years answering that question. I think about a ten-year-old boy standing in a store, reading a book he couldn’t take home. I want to make something that makes him stay through the credits.

And I want him to have the book.