“I feel like the mission that we’re all embarking on is bigger,” Edi Gathegi said of the new film. “We’re attempting to right the wrongs of history with this project.”

The wrongs he speaks of are the rise of the Western genre and the very concept of the cowboy being constructed as a tall, work-weary, and tanned white man.

“Black people have been conspicuously left out of the story when it comes to the old west. There are reasons for that that we all are aware of, but now…we’re leaning into those conversations.”

“We became so good at [breaking horses, cattle driving] that stories of our exploits started to travel, and become popular and famous,” Gathegi went on. “Then you have white writers hear about those stories, write about those characters, but make them white. And that was the beginning of the erasure. The [Western] genre was created erasing us.”