Politics & Power Quote by Joe Lando

Joe Lando’s line is the sound of 90s television trying to launder a costume choice through “respect.” The tell is in the list: tomahawk, hair, leather outfit, “the whole thing.” He’s not describing a character so much as a brand kit - a bundle of visual cues designed to read as rugged, frontier-adjacent masculinity at a glance. The commission becomes a moral footnote stapled onto an aesthetic: an attempt to frame a potentially loaded prop as authentic, even conscientious, without interrogating why that prop is central to his image in the first place.

The intent is defensive but also pragmatic. Early seasons are when a show is still negotiating its look, and actors get invested in signature elements that help them stand out in a crowded TV ecosystem. “I commissioned a Native American artist” functions as a credential: it implies permission, craft, and cultural legitimacy. Yet the subtext is that Indigenous identity is being treated as a seal of approval for a trope - the tomahawk as shorthand for “untamed” grit - rather than as a living culture with its own meanings and boundaries.

What makes the quote work, and also indicts it, is its casualness. Lando speaks as if the ethical question is already solved by the act of hiring, sidestepping the larger issue: when mainstream Western storytelling borrows Indigenous symbols to decorate non-Indigenous heroism, it often turns people into props and history into vibe. The “whole thing” is precisely the problem - an entire aesthetic pipeline where representation gets reduced to accessories.