Without a doubt, one of the most compelling characters on “1923” is Aminah Nieves, who plays Teonna Rainwater, a young Native American woman whose drive to survive and righteous rage has kept viewers tuning in week after week.
However, it turns out that Nieves came very close to passing up the project altogether.
“I waited until the last possible moment to actually put it on tape,” the actor said while speaking to Insider ahead of the season one finale.
“I was very reluctant,” she explained. “I remember emailing back and forth with my manager at the time and being just like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this or not,’ and he was like, ‘It’s fine. Whatever you decide to do, I stand behind you, it’s all good.'”
Nieves, who is of Indigenous descent, shared that she turned to her family for guidance as she wasn’t sure how to feel about the idea of recreating the atrocities faced by generations of Native Americans for entertainment.
It turns out that her mom saw it differently. For her, it was an opportunity to highlight the systematic oppression that their people had suffered that doesn’t get much screen time in mainstream media.
“She kept encouraging me,” the actor said. “She was like, ‘Aminah, you should just do it. This is for all of our people. Do it for me, do it for your family, do it for your community, for all of us.'”
“I was so nervous, shaking and just rushing to get the pages out because like I said, I didn’t think I was going to do it truly,” Nieves recalled.
Nevertheless, Nieves caught the eye of creator Taylor Sheridan and director Ben Richardson and was asked to do two further self-taped auditions before she and her mom flew to Wyoming for one final test read.
“I think after about the second one, I was like, ‘Yeah, this, this isn’t even my decision anymore,’ and it’s not even my mom’s really,” she said.
“Something else was moving through me. It was like, ‘You have to do it.'”
Nieves, who has previously starred in the 2022 horror anthology film “V/H/S/99” and the 2021 queer romance “Blueberry,” landed the role, of course, and her powerful performance has brought into public consciousness the cultural genocide that Native Americans suffered throughout the 19th and 20th century.
In “1923,” Nieves plays a young girl from the “Yellowstone” universe’s fictional Broken Rock Reservation who has been taken away from her tribe and placed in a boarding school miles from her home.
There, she experiences horrific physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by those in charge of her care before exacting her revenge and fleeing into South Dakota’s treacherous Badlands.
The school, like so many government and church-run institutions that cropped up across North America and Canada between the early 1800s and mid-1900s, has one agenda: to “kill the Indian” and “save the man,” as the founder of the first such school phrased it.
Watching scenes in which Teonna is abused by the likes of Sister Mary (Jennifer Ehle) and Father Renaud (Sebastian Roché) was not easy for Nieves’ family, especially the older generations.
“It’s hard to watch anyone go through that, but especially with the circumstances,” she said. “So to have that, on top of that, you’re watching your daughter, your sister, your niece, what have you.”
“I think it’s very hard for them, but they’re so incredibly proud and supportive of me,” she said. “Even my grandfather called me and he was like, ‘I’m so proud of you, my superstar. Things that Teonna did to the nuns is what I did too.'”
“That wrecked me, I was crying,” Nieves said.
