Scripted speech reflects and structures power and social difference within society. On-screen linguistic differences are bundled with other semiotic features to create characters. These depictions widely circulate, often promoting essentialized, monolithic interpretations instead of more complicated representations grounded in everyday practices. As a result, stereotypes of Indigenous characters instantiate a settler-colonial framework, termed White Supremacy in U.S. contexts (Roth-Gordon 2023). However, scripted performances are also sites where these interpretations can be reconfigured. Our paper examines how Indigenous screen creatives illuminate and disrupt the linguistic and semiotic erasures of White settler-colonial frameworks.  We focus on the structure and performance of one type of scripted speech event: fictionalized land acknowledgements. We analyze these events across five Indigenous-authored television series (two in the U.S. and three in Australia; see Bednarek, in press), showing how the overlaying of different linguistic features diversifies characters’ linguistic repertoires and brings in Indigenous discourses and perspectives.

Using the process of overlay (Meek and Bednarek, in press), we show how Indigenous language practices layered onto dominant discourse can index Indigenous perspectives. For example, a land acknowledgement in Mohawk unsettles expectations because it is not legible to an English monolingual audience–except for the mayor’s name and codeswitched English phrases like “unfortunate genocide” and “unemployment” (Helms et al., 2022). Such processes of overlay add to and disrupt the typical ritual of the land acknowledgement, highlighting their colonial underpinnings. By "bending the rules," speakers do not undo the genre, but regain some autonomy over it through their refashioning of it. Our analysis explores how land acknowledgements operate as Indigenous and non-Indigenous speech events, and how Indigenous screen creatives transform these events through their linguistic practices. Ultimately, our research contributes to ongoing conversations about the role of Indigenous language and discourse in media in transforming societal norms and structural injustices.