Sierra Teller Ornelas achieved her childhood dream when she took the helm of "Rutherford Falls," a series on the Peacock streaming service that she and her partners developed about Native people in the 21st century.

"It was over a decade of really working and learning and kind of honing my craft," Ornelas said. "I feel like once I got into the position of showrunner in the same way my mom taught us to weave over the years and years, you start pretty early and learn. I feel like I was it was very much the right place at the right time for me."

The show, about the relationships and interactions between Natives and non-Natives in the eponymous Rutherford Falls, completed its first season last year moves into a second season on the streaming service this week.

Ornelas, a member of the Navajo Nation, is the first Native person to run a TV comedy show and she, along with actor and writer Jana Schmieding, actor Kiowa Gordon and other Native show business pros are part of a movement that helps viewers see Indian Country through Indigenous eyes.

The growing numbers of Indigenous actors, directors, writers, producers and others are becoming more visible in Hollywood and opening a window — or a screen — into modern Native lives. 

Ornelas said she wanted to be a comedy writer since second grade. But growing up in Tucson, she also learned another art form: Navajo weaving.

Her mother, Barbara Teller Ornelas, brother, Michael, and aunt, Lynda Teller Pete, are all acclaimed weavers, and Sierra also mastered the skill of creating art from wool. She has shown her work at museums and galleries and her production company is called Booth Fee in honor of her days working the Indian market circuit.

After earning a degree from the University of Arizona, Ornelas worked as a film programmer at the National Museum of the American Indian. But Hollywood continued calling to her, and in 2010, Ornelas moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career weaving words.

She landed a spot in Disney/ABC Television Group's diversity writing program, which led to her first writing job on the ABC show "Happy Endings." She also wrote for shows "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," "Splitting Up Together" and "Superstore." 

Ornelas said the writers and producers at "Happy Endings" helped her hone her talent.

"They all had a really great vision of how television should be made, and they really loved to kind of mentor the new writers," she said. "And so I always thought, like, if I ever have a show, you know, I'd love to do it the way they did it." 

Other showrunners also saw Ornelas' talent, particularly producer and writer Mike Schur, who hired her at "Brooklyn Nine-Nine." Along the way, she met Ed Helms, an actor and producer known for his roles in "The Office" and the "Hangover" films.

Helms and Schur came to Ornelas with an idea for a show called "Rutherford Falls." The series would be set in a Native reservation and cast a comedic eye on the themes and concepts of America.

Ornelas brought her perspective from years engaging with non-Indians, having grown up in museums, to showcase her vision of what the series could be. Among other honors, "my mom was an an artist in residence at the Heard," she said.

"Rutherford Falls'" characters, including Regan, casino CEO and fellow Minishonka tribal member Terry Thomas, and other Native characters were based on Ornelas's friends and family, and stories from her mother, Barbara. Schur and Helms loved it, and the trio spent a year developing the show.

Ornelas was also responsible for opening the door to one of Indian Country's newest stars, Jana Schmieding, who plays Regan Wells in "Rutherford Falls."

Schmieding, a Lakota Sioux and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said she was close to giving up her dream of a career in show business.

"I was having difficulty getting accepted into diversity programs," she said. 

That all changed when she interviewed Ornelas on her podcast "Woman of Size." The podcast explored how women of a certain size — plus-size to be exact — experienced discrimination.

"I had been hearing about her, this Native woman who is a TV writer, and she's doing the thing that I really want to be doing," Schmieding said. "It was symbiotic because she was trying to staff the 'Rutherford' writers room and I was trying to get people to read my comedy pilots."

At the end of the podcast, Ornelas asked for a writing sample. After bring hired as a writer, Schmieding auditioned for and won the lead role of Regan, a member of the fictional Minishonka Tribe in the Northeast whose best friend is Nathan Rutherford (Helms), scion of the founder of the 17th-century Rutherford Falls.

Schmieding said she didn't believe TV and film work would be an option for her.

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"I pursued the performing arts quietly as a hobby, just did it for joy," she said. After doing theater, choir and music in high school in Canby, Oregon, where she grew up, Schmieding earned a degree in theater arts.

"While I was at the University of Oregon, I got an opportunity to study in London. Studying Shakespeare in London exposed me to some really, really incredible theater," she said. "And just the experience of making other people laugh was really a huge part of my journey."

Bringing the joy she found in performing to the world, though, took more than a decade. Schmieding first moved to New York to find acting success. Her day job was teaching humanities classes in middle and high schools while performing with an improv group.

In 2016, after what she called a 10-year "grind" of teaching by day and performing by night, she switched to pursuing a writing career and moved to Los Angeles. But she continued hitting brick walls, and was close to giving up and returning home to Oregon when Ornelas asked her to join the Rutherford Falls writing staff.

Schmieding's portrayal of Regan, who, like her best friend Nathan, is smart but a bit of a misfit, has resonated with Native women. She's asked about where she buys her outfits ("all the plus-size outlets like ASOS Curve, Eloquii and Torrid" among others) and jewelry (a talented bead artist, she makes some for herself and friends, and buys more from other Native artists). And she's having the time of her life.

 "I'm just very excited to go on this journey with everybody else," she said.

Kiowa Gordon, a member of the Hualapai Tribe, is best known to legions of fans of the "Twilight" movies as shapeshifting werewolf Embry Call. He's currently starring as Navajo detective Jim Chee in "Dark Winds," an AMC series based on the long-running series of books by Tony Hillerman.

The series depicts Chee and his partner Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) as they solve crimes in Dinetah. 

"Just being when you see names like George R.R. Martin, Robert Redford, Chris Eyre and Graham's name on the script there, just like, 'Yeah, I don't even care. I just want to work with these people,'" said Gordon. Graham Roland is showrunner on "Dark Winds." 

His mom, Camille Nighthorse, is also an actor and took the young Kiowa with her to sets she was working on, like "Black Cloud" and "Skinwalkers." Growing up in the "biz" eventually led to him getting acting jobs.

Gordon's big break came when "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer spotted him in church.

"She asked if Kiowa was willing to audition for the second 'Twilight' film," said Nighthorse. 

"I think it's our time," Nighthorse said. "It has a lot do with the programs offered to Native writers."

Nighthorse also noted the increase in substantial roles for Indigenous actors in shows like "Longmire" over the past decade. 

More Natives are taking roles as directors, producers and writers. Among these are:

"I think we are in a period in our culture where I think laughter can be a really delightful salve for some of the harshness that we're experiencing," said Schmieding, who has also appeared on "Reservation Dogs." "I'm grappling with how do we experience joy during times of hardship? And I think that that's something that our show is trying to hold, two things at once and having dynamic experiences in life."

Ornelas said the press asked her and her staff many questions about representation and hard questions about bringing complexity to Native peoples' hard history.

She answered some of those questions in an episode in season two where Regan and Terry serve as cultural consultants to another TV show that wasn't so wedded to accurate portrayals of Native people.

"So we really wanted to talk about what that actual experience feels like, because I think many people have been asked at some point our career to be cultural consultants on a project that you're trying to fix." She said she felt the compulsion to help and at the same time deal with the mess of what gets made. "We talked about what that actually felt like and what that was like for those characters and what we would do in that situation in the funniest way possible." 

"I think that there's a lot of truth and and beauty that comes from comedy," said Ornelas, who said her two loves are being Native and being a comedy writer. "It's having the opportunity to combine those things and have people enjoy them, especially Indian Country in the way that they have, has just been a huge blessing and a huge achievement in my life and I'm so excited for people to see."

Season two of "Rutherford Falls" debuted June 16. All eight episodes are available on Peacock. "Dark Winds" airs on AMC Sundays through July 12.

Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at debra.krol@azcentral.com. Follow her on Twitter at @debkrol. 

Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation.

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