Reports: Native Actors Walk Off Adam Sandler Movie Set

The movie was being filmed in Las Vegas, New Mexico

The Indian Country Today Media Network

that "approximately a dozen" Native American actors and actresses walked off the Las Vegas, New Mexico set of an Adam Sandler film, The Ridiculous Six , in protest "after the satirical western’s script repeatedly insulted native women and elders and grossly misrepresented Apache culture."

According to the report, published Thursday, "The examples of disrespect included Native women's names such as Beaver's Breath and No Bra, an actress portraying an Apache woman squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe, and feathers inappropriately positioned on a teepee."

Karen Barragan, spokeswoman for Netflix, which will debut the film, did not return a request for comment Thursday. 

The New Mexico Film Office says the Happy Madison Productions' movie began filming in Santa Fe and surrounding areas in February and is in part produced by Sandler, whose agency directed SFR to Barragan for comment.


The Santa Fe New Mexican quotes cartoonist Ricardo Caté, illustrator of the paper's "Without Reservations," as saying  that "only a handful of Native Americans walked off the set" and that there is "little offensive material in the script."

"There's nothing worse [in the script] than anything in my cartoons," Caté told the New Mexican. "If anything racial or racist happened I would have walked off. The shoot has been fine, everybody has been happy."

"All I know at this point is I am traveling to South Dakota to address a racial incident involving 57 Native children who were doused with beer by ignorant racists," he writes in a Facebook post, "an [the incident] hardly received any media attention. Not THAT, my friends, is what should be on the discussion table."

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