If you need a Native actor, if you are desperate for authenticity or ‘gravitas’, if you are an “indie film project” which translates as “low budget”, if you need an Indian who’s been there, wherever it is you are in Indian country, then you can’t go wrong with calling on Richard Ray Whitman.

Richard is Yuchi/Creek living in Oklahoma City and has had small but important roles in recent Native films, such as Drunktown’s Finest for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Award at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco. He’s also happy about having been in what many people consider the Best Native Movie of 2013, Winter in the Blood, directed by Alex and Andrew Smith, from the novel by James Welch. This indie film has received good reviews but has not been seen in wide release.

Richard says, “What I do isn’t Hollywood, it's work. I’m still a starving artist. As an artist it’s just another way to work, to keep working. Hey, I’m kinda desperate as an artist and maybe these film projects and directors are desperate, what with low budgets and time issues.” That’s exactly how he got role of a Navajo medicine man in Sydney Freeland’s award-winning film, Drunktown’s Finest. Finding Whitman was last minute and an act of desperation and faith by the director and producers; but for Richard, the test was speaking in Navajo. Freeland needed someone for the pivotal part to connect with the audience and it worked out well for both of them. Whitman got the call, got to the location and “…went up to a group of Indian men on set, we talked and turns out we knew some of the same people, Road Men, then we talked about the movie and turns out the director is his daughter.”

And that’s kind of the way it is for Richard Ray, he’s been around, he knows people.

Whitman goes back over 25 years counting film projects and movie roles, with two good recent reviews in the New York Times—some actors may never get that. Nicolas Rapold had good things to say about him in Drunktown’s Finest and Stephen Holden had a long review of Barking Water, an early film by Sterlin Harjo. Harjo wrote the script and wanted Richard Ray and Casey Camp-Horinek as the older couple. It worked out because they ended up as husband and wife again in Winter in the Blood. Of course Whitman is the frozen ghost of a father to Chaske Spencer and is slowly dying and saying his farewells in Barking Water. Harjo wanted to do Winter in the Blood, but Whitman said most people in the business knew the film would be a tough project; tricks of the mind, surreal and magical are phrases used to describe Welch’s writing. And then Richard will tell you that the Smith Brothers who did Winter in the Blood, had also lost their father and they all became friends with the Welch family, so James became a father figure and the film a labor of love.

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The exciting news is he just wrapped another film role, the new movie from Scottish director Steven Lewis Simpson titled, Neither Wolf nor Dog, a highly anticipated project from the novel by Kent Nerburn set in Pine Ridge in 1994. Nerburn’s trilogy of novels (the other two titles are The Wolf at Twilight and The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo) is loved by Natives and non-Natives alike. Nerburn (who also wrote the screenplay) says the novels are non-fiction, narratives collected from Native people he knows and interviewed. Simpson has previously worked with Native actors and themes on Rez Bomb and Thunder-Being Nation. Both these men have built up some trust with Native People, Nerburn lives in Bemidji, MN, where he wrote the books that changed his life (To Walk the Red Road, and, We Chose to Remember) working with Red Lake Chippewa students; and Simpson working in Pine Ridge for the last 15 years (filming Thunder-Being Nation took 13 years).

Richard speaks fondly of David Bald Eagle, the elder turned actor who plays the main character. The novel is sub-titled Down Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder, and the Elder teaches the Author (actor Christopher Sweeney plays Nerburn) quite a few things, often with humor and mostly about the author’s misconceptions about Indian People and their ways. John Trudell was offered a role but his busy schedule couldn’t fit in the Indie-film constraints. So again Whitman is considered, and it is his body of work in small roles through recent Native films that got him the part of Grover. And of course he knows people at Pine Ridge from 41 years ago at Wounded Knee, which amazed Simpson.