RIP Graham Greene

Graham Greene has walked on. The Oneida First Nations actor, who was good in every role he inhabited, died this week at the age of 73.

For more than four decades, Greene gave voice and weight to characters who might otherwise have been forgotten. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Dances with Wolves (1990), where his performance as Kicking Bird gave audiences a character at once human and dignified in a role that in older movies might have been a simple stereotype. He kept working, showing up in films like Thunderheart, The Green Mile, Smoke Signals, Wind River, and so many more, each time bringing that same grounded authenticity. He was the kind of actor who made the project better just by being there.

For Native performers, Greene was a pioneer. He showed it was possible to make a career without surrendering to Hollywood’s worst caricatures. For the rest of us, he was a reminder that Native characters, Native lives, weren’t side notes to the American story. They were the story.

My wife and I always lit up when he showed up on screen, never more than when he recently appeared as Maximus in Reservation Dogs. That role—funny, sly, full of heart—felt like the culmination of everything Greene had built across his career. As Maximus, he played an eccentric uncle who spoke to spirits and lived on the margins of his community, a man both mocked and revered, and ultimately revealed as a bearer of wisdom. In lesser hands, the character could have been a stereotype: the mystical Indian, the comic oddball. But Greene knew how to lace humor with sorrow, and how to let dignity rise out of vulnerability. He gave Maximus a lived-in humanity, making him a bridge between generations; the last echoes of an older world and the stubborn hope of what comes next. In doing so, he showed exactly why he was such a revered actor: he carried the weight of past misrepresentation and turned it into something new, something future Native performers can build on. A Native elder who wasn’t just a trope, but a man worth listening to.

The man’s body of work is long. The hole he leaves is larger. Greene’s legacy is that future Native American and First Nations actors won’t have to start from scratch. Greene blazed a trail. And for those of us who just liked to see him work, we’ll miss how good you knew a movie or show was going to be whenever he showed up.

Rest easy, Graham Greene. You were great.