The Serie Dark Winds, by Graham Roland on AMC+, The film begins in 1971 in Gallup, New Mexico, on the edge of the Navajo Indian reservation (Navajo Nation or Navajoland, 71,000 square kilometres of terrifyingly arid land), the largest in the USA, with a violent attack on an armoured van that includes automatic weapons, point-blank shooting and the robbers’ escape in a helicopter. It then jumps to a mysterious double murder (of two Navajos), already inside the reservation, with ritual components: one of the victims has had her eyes torn out and the other is a young traditional healer, who seems to have died of sheer fear. The only witness is the girl’s aunt, an elderly, blind and traumatised medicine woman. Both cases become intertwined as the Navajo tribal police (the most famous native body along with the Oglala Lakota Nation Police Department) and the FBI investigate. From the beginning, the parameters within which the story will move are clear: the contemporary world, its values and crimes, confronted with native mysticism, the world of Navajo beliefs, including their own concept of Evil. The tension between both elements that intersect, modernity and tradition, constitutes the basis of the plot of Dark Winds.
We are in familiar and very stimulating territory, exciting even: the grounds of what could be considered a whole section of the detective genre, the police with Indians, the not to go coppery, if we can call it that, part of what has been called detective western and which consists of taking the story of a crime investigation to the classic settings of the American West, its characters and landscapes. In this specific subgenre, the Indian reservation is especially prominent, an enclosed space with its own characteristics, traditions and laws, and the native police in charge of maintaining order there in the face of a threat that comes from both inside and outside. Such notable films as the extraordinary Wind River (2017), by Taylor Sheridan, about the rape and death of a young Indian woman on the Shoshone and Arapahoe reservation in Wyoming (in a freezing climate that is the reverse of the desert of Dark Winds) and in which a vermin hunter, a Miami FBI detective and tribal police try to solve the crime. Thunder Heartby Michael Apted (1992), with an FBI agent (Val Kilmer) with Indian blood (and what blood, perhaps the reincarnation of a Crazy Horse warrior), investigating the murder of a leader in a Lakota reservation that recreates that of Pine Ridge, in the context of the turbulence caused by the American Indian Movement (AIM), and at the same time discovering a conspiracy and his own roots.
Dark Windswith Robert Redford and George RR Martin, no less, in the production and a first season of six chapters to be followed in 2023 by another one, is the adaptation of a series of very popular mystery novels by Tony Hillerman (1925-2008), considered the most famous author of New Mexico. Hillerman, Silver Star and Purple Heart in World War II, was white, but he was educated with Potawatomi Indians in Oklahoma, so he grew up immersed in the culture of the Native Americans. Composed of 18 original titles (Hillerman’s daughter, Anne Hillerman, is continuing it), the series, started in 1970 with The blessing waystars two members of the Navajo tribal police, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (who appeared first) and Officer Jim Chee (who joined later), both natives, who investigate cases affecting the indigenous community. It is tempting to say that a Navajo detective has to be good at passing Occam’s razor.
The first season of the series, which bears the generic title of Hillerman’s fifth novel, Dark Windsactually adapts material from two of the other novels, especially the third, Listening Woman (1978), and elements of the fourth, People of darkness (1980). The novels, eight of which, including Storm of darkness and The Village of Shadowshave been published in Spanish between 1980 and 2001 by different publishers such as Olañeta, Versal, Júcar and especially Grijalbo, have already had film and television versions, such as the film Coyote Waits (2003) —about the tenth installment—, in which Lieutenant Leaphorn was played by the omnipresent Cherokee actor Wes Studi— and Skinwalkers —the seventh—, made for television in 2002.
Dark Windsexciting and very interesting in its double story of criminal investigation (split into various plots) and the customs and beliefs (and superstitions) of the Navajos, works wonderfully and is definitive in this, in addition to the spectacular landscape of Monument Valley and the Four Corners, and the setting, with surreal and even paranormal touches in the wake of Twin Peaks and True detectivethe solidity of the main characters, those Leaphorn and Chee who in the series are played respectively by Zahn McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon. Gordon, who is not, despite his name, Kiowa but German with a Hualapai mother (the natives of the mountains of northwestern Arizona), played a werewolf boy in Twilight. Here he puts a sensual Marlon Brandon-esque physique at the service of a character who is a policeman of Navajo origin who left the reservation as a child and returns as reinforcement for the tribal force but with something more in his luggage.
As for McClarnon, who looks like a Wes Studi, he is the son of an Irish father and a Hunkpapa Sioux mother and was visiting his grandparents on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. He learned Comanche in 2017 for his role as the tribal chief in the series The son, about Philip Meyer’s great novel. Much of the Indian atmosphere of Dark Winds, The story that seems to be made of sand, flies, mezcal and dead dogs is created by McClarnon, with his frugal parsimony, his dry, leathery and always circumspect face and his gaunt figure that are a reflection of the aridity of the landscape of the reservation and its difficult living conditions. A third protagonist, who also appears in the novels, is the priceless sergeant of the tribal police Bernadette Manuelito, played by Jessica Matten, a mix of Canadian Métis-Cree and Eurasian. As seen in this Dark Winds Navajo is actually a true pow pow of tribes. The Navajos, on the other hand, have always given a lot of themselves, from Manuelito (the brave historical chief persecuted by Colonel Miles) to the Code talkers.
A rich cast of supporting characters spices up the dish, with characters such as a brutal Indian (Seminole in the original novels), a murderer and a disfigured man related to an Indian liberation movement, the Buffalo Society; an obsequious native Franciscan priest, an FBI agent with his own roadmap, the reservation doctor (Leaphorn’s wife), a black shopkeeper who sells souvenirs and kachinas, and a terrifying Navajo witch. Witchcraft, so relevant in the Navajo worldview (with the dangerous skinwalkers either yeee naaldlooshii pitted against medicine men and women) has a fundamental role in the series, which subscribes to the classic game with the supernatural that works so well in police stories with Indians (for example, in Thunder Heart). As a character from Dark Winds, “If you’re on a reservation among people who believe in spirits, you believe in them too.” Although the series has had the support of the Navajo community, its treatment of indigenous spiritual life, rites and taboos has been the subject of some criticism. In any case, the layman learns many things, including how to greet in Navajo: already at eh.
Of particular note is the series’ reflection of the sociological reality of Indian life on reservations, with its poverty (life expectancy is very low and unemployment rates very high), addictions and violence. Indian women are raped and assaulted at a rate four times higher than the average in the US, they are ten times more likely to be murdered, and crimes and disappearances often go unsolved. The ecological dimension could not be left out either, with the plot of contamination of ancestral lands involved.
