Native American Noir may be a new genre for those who expect noir to be 1940's-era Robert Mitchum in a fedora, trench coat and smirk as he drives through a rainy city at night looking for clues. AMC's new limited series Dark Winds possesses the basic elements of the genre -- murders that need solving, unimpressed witnesses not inclined to help, and a hero who can take a punch -- at its core. Yet it adds a quality rarely found in noir or other genres: respect.
Respect runs deep in Dark Winds. Respect for the land is shown through a lens that lovingly captures the desert's majesty. There's respect for Native Americans, who speak Navajo and honor tradition. That feeling only deepens during the six-hour series based on Tony Hillerman's best-selling novels.
If the title sounds familiar, that's because there have been movies based on these characters, but Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin were working for decades to bring it to TV. They picked Graham Roland to join them as an executive producer. Roland, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, is also the creator of the series. A Marine vet, he ensures another layer of respect threaded throughout – an inherent understanding of how a Native American in a uniform, doing his job, bridges cultures.
As co-creator of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, contractual obligations precluded Roland from serving as showrunner on Dark Winds. Still, he wrote for this and was deeply involved in the series, as he explained in an exclusive Zoom interview with MediaVillage.com.
"The thing that really made me want to do this project was growing up, my dad's generation, the Native Americans, were antagonists," Roland said. "They were the threat to the cowboys or the homesteaders. In the '90s, when I was growing up and watching films, there were strides forward. A film like Dances with Wolves, which is in many ways a beautiful film, went to great lengths to humanize and dimensionalize the Native characters, and there were other things in that vein during that time. "It’s the old Trojan horse of, well, it's really about the Natives, but we're just using the white character to bring you into the Native story," he continued. "I didn't want to do that. I'd always wanted to tell the story pure, with a Native protagonist."
Growing up in Oklahoma and California, Roland loved to read and write. He served in Iraq, was honorably discharged from the Marines in 2006, and enrolled at the University of California, Fullerton. A new class, TV writing, was taught by Robert Engels, a writer for the original Twin Peaks. Engels recognized Roland's talent and encouraged him.
Roland, who wrote for Prison Break, Lost and Fringe, is heartened by TV's broadening diversity. "We're also in an exciting time in television in terms of how much you can accomplish, in terms of budget, the sophistication of storytelling, and the actors that you can get," he explained. "There is an appetite now for representation in Hollywood. And so, people who are making these decisions on what shows get made and what don't are actively looking to do stories in diverse communities. And I have to give credit where credit's due for a show like Reservation Dogs, which preceded us. They proved that there is a mass audience.
"You're getting to see Native -- not only Native stories being told, but being told by Native voices and Native filmmakers," he added. "People trying to break in are finally getting their 'in.' It's a wonderful thing, and it's exciting to be a very small part of that."
In Dark Winds, Zahn McClarnon (pictured at top) plays Joe Leaphorn, lieutenant of the tribal police. Leaphorn's new deputy is Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon, pictured above). Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten, pictured below) is a tribal officer whose role expands from the original story.
Officers must contend with a sleazy FBI Agent (Noah Emmerich). Many characters, including Leaphorn, are scarred from the whitewashing of their youth. He was enrolled in an assimilation school, where whites tried to strip him of his identity. The casual racism of 1971 is as woven into the series as are the Navajo rituals, such as a touching scene where a girl's menarche is celebrated. In a ceremony, she sprints, leading her friends past scrubby trees as the camera pulls back, granting viewers stunning vistas.
The action mainly unfolds in the Navajo Nation, spread over 27,413 square miles, making it larger than Ireland. Dark Winds received the rare permission to shoot on tribal lands and afford viewers a sense of the Four Corners where striated mesas punctuate pristine open space. The series affords characters space to be themselves, speak in Navajo in unhurried scenes, and, crucial to Roland, do so correctly.
"We had Diné in our writers' room," Roland said, using the Navajo word for the people. "We were constantly checking with them on everything to make sure it felt authentic."
Beyond the cultural accuracy, Roland strove for a human connection. "And what I mean by that is making each of the Native characters fully rounded human beings going through their own drama," he noted.
Roland made Leaphorn's wife, Emma, a midwife, a diversion from the books. This allows her work to entwine with her husband's complicated case that unfurls over the season. There's murder, money laundering, kidnapping, carjacking and shoot-outs. Leaphorn's integrity and his harmony with the land are evident throughout. Would every officer notice the bend in a branch to alert him that someone had just walked this dry path and scraped against the bush? Would others be able to move silently to track culprits? Smell chemicals in the water?
Leaphorn and Emma (Deanna Allison) mourn the death of their son, killed in a mining explosion. Self-contained and astute, these qualities can loom large in novels but are tricky to translate to the screen.
"Tony had left me a pretty good roadmap," Roland said. "One of the things that I encountered right away with this adaptation was taking a little bit of license with the characters he created and their backstories. So much of what was happening in the books is based around what he's investigating. And it's very present. In a TV show, we're dealing with characters, so hopefully, we will be spending hours and hours with them over the years, and I really wanted to start them in a place of internal conflict. And the place where they're kind of wrestling with their own demons while they're investigating the case, which wasn't necessarily the case of the novels."
Considering Hillerman wrote 18 books in this series, Roland cracks a smile reckoning how long this could run. "I'm saying 17 seasons,">