Next Monday (Oct. 12), former New Japan and WWE wrestler Karl Fredericks is curating a PRODUCE Wrestling show in Brooklyn to celebrate Indigenous People’s Day. As part of promoting that event, PRODUCE Vol. 5: Skoden, Fredericks gave a lengthy interview to Ray Petree of the Augusta Free Press
.Fredericks naturally spoke a great deal about his own Indigenous heritage, and his experiences during two years in WWE Developmental as Eddy Thorpe. He was glad WWE let him use the name Thorpe in honor of legendary
Indigenous athlete Jim Thorpe, but other than that Fredericks says his NXT run was a struggle:
“I’m always fucking thinking I think back to to my first week in the [Performance Center], when I finally have a talk with [Shawn Michaels]. I’d sent them some matches, and he came over and he was like, ‘really cool stuff.’ Blah, blah, blah. He gave me a nice little pep talk. Then he was like, ‘I think you’re a baby face, you know, because you’re Indian! I think that’s cool!’
“Right off the bat, in my head, that was a red flag. I didn’t expect too much. out of Shawn[…] I could gauge where his awareness was with any of this shit is.
“I don’t want to be Tatanka.”
His early promos led to negative, sometimes hateful, reactions online, which Fredericks partially blamed on the audience not knowing his character because “this person doesn’t exist in the real world today anyways.”
“I remember saying, like, I can’t be stuck out in the forest for too long, and I remember being told that I’m playing a character on TV. Yeah, I’m playing a character written by white man who don’t know anything about me. And here’s Shawn, ‘well, you know, I read a lot about Indian stuff. I think they’re — I think it’s real cool.’ Blah, blah. You know, that doesn’t fucking do anything for me. I’m glad you think it’s cool. You know, I didn’t say that, but that’s how I feel when I hear that shit. Like, great. It’s neat to you. What does that do? What does that do for me? Where do we go from here? Do you think that makes me feel better about it all?
“There were times where what I thought we were doing was cool. Then there were times, a lot of times actually, where I would get the scraps, especially towards the end. And I was struggling real bad, mentally. You can see it in my fucking physique as well, I was, not — I was fighting for my life working there. Doing the shit that I was doing… I remember getting scripts and just seeing the words, and just giving up. Like, there’s no way I can rewrite this. This must be what they want. If I rewrite this, it’s still going to be just this bullshit, meaningless cultural slop; using big, fancy words and sounding like an asshole.
“I remember one specifically, that I was fucking hot about[…] The writer that wrote this particular promo — I was really close with him. He hands it to me, I read it, and I’m just like, abso-fucking-lutely not, brother. What the fuck is this?
“This man’s not even from the United States. He doesn’t know any better. That was the other hard part. I’m telling you the way it made me feel, but there was no malintent on his end. You know, it’s just what I deal with in my everyday life about my cultural identity. It’s either a joke to people or it’s just ignorance. They don’t know, because this isn’t shit we teach. That particular promo was about me wanting to leave the reservation and not worry about my people’s cultural expectations. To leave the reservation and assimilate to the wider world[…] To me, that sounds like I’m leaving the reservation, to go to a fucking assimilation school, to go to Carlisle, so I can be beaten, and raped, and all the shit that happened to those kids.
“Just the fact that the word assimilate was in there; I had to give him a little history lesson.
“I’m dealing with this bullshit. I’m passing sage over an injured arm, like what the fuck am I doing on television?
“I was giving up. I decided that I would just deliver. Every big match, every storyline, just deliver. And, they were happy. I just needed to get through this shit. We can get past this, and I won’t ever have to do it again. But I just never really got there.”
Trying to navigate that at work during the run-up to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election proved to be too much for Fredericks, especially given WWE’s ties to the White Christian Nationalist-friendly Trump admininstration.
“I got the fucking vice president [JD Vance], lying on my fucking people. The same colonial bullshit and lies, that we’re fucking cannibals. ICE, at the time, was just getting going with this bullshit while I’m under contract with WWE. White men are writing for me. I got fucking Immigration detaining, harassing, abusing my people. The fact that they’re doing it to anybody already has me hot, right? But then it’s the fucking natives, you know? My people. What the fuck do you mean immigration’s detaining my people?
“And, I got to deal with Paul Levesque going on TV and talking about Trump while this is happening: ‘Well, you know, here’s a guy that can generate heat.’
“What a stupid fucking thing to say. But, again, on my end, they just think my culture’s ‘cool.’ That’s who these people are. It’s all just stuff to them. It’s not fucking real.
“It was not the environment for me to happily thrive.”
Fredericks told Petree his own story, which included recounting generational trauma inflicted on the people who called North America home before it was colonized by Europeans. Painting a picture of modern Indigenous communities helps illustrate why he was frustrated at WWE:
“I don’t quite know what [my heritage] means. It’s, if anything, you know, it’s getting by and surviving. And, no more. No more than that. I know it’s a sad answer, but it’s — my people are in a sad fucking state, man. The kids I grew up with, you know, damn near all of them: dead, suicide, most of them[…] I’m someone that struggles with mental health issues greatly as well. Just this year alone, you know, I got family dying too young. I got friends dying from suicide, friends of friends, you know? My people. My sister works for the tribe, in my hometown. And, there are suicides every year; anyone from older adults, to kids who are way too fucking young. This is just the reality.”
Indirectly, that’s also something that motivated Fredericks in NXT:
“One of the things that’s always got me through dealing with the silly stuff I was doing in WWE was that people would reach out to me on Instagram… Anytime a native person would reach out to me and tell me that they loved seeing what I was doing, like, I know what that meant. That bought me so much mileage, you know? Even if it’s this silly stuff, like, fuck man, I had nobody on TV. Especially being an Indian. There’s not a single movie I could watch, unless we start splitting hairs or digging in the vault. You’ll find some nods here and there, but I couldn’t look at ‘Stone Cold’ and see a family member and him. I couldn’t look at The Rock and see a family member.
“At least I’m being someone that would have been really good for me to see as a kid.”
Petree’s piece on his talk with Fredericks is a long read, but a worthwhile one. He also talks about his time in New Japan’s LA Dojo, and about his relationship with fiancee Charlie (fka WWE’s Dakota Kai, fka Evie), who he credits with getting him through the knee injury that’s kept him laid up for the past Sunday months.
Monday, he celebrates Indigenous People’s Day by main eventing against Javi (fka Javier Bernal) on a show he helped produce.
That show will stream on MyAEW.
