Politics & Power Quote by Skeet Ulrich

Ulrich’s line lands with the bluntness of someone bumping into history mid-conversation and realizing it’s not a tasteful backdrop. “The Native American side was tragic” reads like an aside, almost a production note: there’s a “side” to America, an alternate track you can choose to notice or keep muted. That casual framing is the subtext. It exposes how Indigenous catastrophe is often treated in mainstream culture - not as the central architecture of the country, but as an optional chapter, a regrettable subplot.

Then he pivots: “It’s just unbelievable what has happened to them.” The word “unbelievable” is doing double duty. On its face, it signals empathy and shock. Underneath, it admits the viewer’s distance: the violence is so massive it doesn’t feel real, which is precisely the problem. Colonization becomes something you can react to with astonishment rather than something you’re implicated in. It’s the language of a person raised on sanitized mythologies finally encountering receipts.

As an actor, Ulrich isn’t speaking in policy or historical detail; he’s speaking in affect. That’s not nothing. Celebrity commentary often fails because it reaches for grand solutions it can’t cash. Here, the intent seems narrower: to puncture complacency, to name the emotional truth that the dominant narrative tries to smooth over. The risk is that “tragic” and “unbelievable” can become aesthetic categories - sorrow as a mood - unless paired with specificity: land theft, forced removal, boarding schools, broken treaties, ongoing sovereignty fights. The quote works because it reveals the gap between what’s common knowledge and what’s culturally metabolized.