Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Zahn McClarnon, Kiowa Gordon, Jessica Matten, Deanna Allison, Jenna Elfman, Ryan Begay, DezBaa’, Betty Anna Martinez, Jeri Ryan, Anderson Kee, Wade Adakai, Tonantzin Carmelo, Alex Maraz, Terry Serpico, Derek Hinkey, Bodhi Okuma Linton, Bruce Greenwood, Raoul Max Trujillo, Christopher Heyerdahl, Carly Roland, Tsosie, Phil Birke, Casimere Jollette, Melissa Chambers, Robert Knepper, George R.R. Martin, Robert Redford.

The native American world has not only shrunk in the way its land has been slowly taken, absorbed, stolen by generations of European settlers; the way it has also found a way to be slowly eradicated by the modern world, old traditions clinging faithfully, but side by side with temptations and dangers that come pre-packaged and wilfully thieved in the name of American expansionism and the ability to make a million dollars over night.

The third series of the enlightening Dark Winds, adapted from the novels by Tony Hillerman focuses even more attention on the diaspora of ritual and place of the Navajo Nation people by drawing attention to the breakdown in the relationship of Joe Leaphorn and his wife against the backdrop of myth, artifacts, and the disease of trafficking, a modern slavery network. It is in this that monsters collide, the sacred and the burden, and it takes the redoubtable veteran tribal police officer, played with ever increasing glory by Zahn McClarnon, and all his powers of resistance, to finally see the truth within the case, and his own despairing position.

Death has its own position in life, its own rituals within any native society, it feels more than a fact of life, it is a spirit that needs to be appeased, never with cowardice or grief, but with recognition, and when used in such a context it adds such a crisis of conscious to the viewer that is unaware of the intricacies of the people that it adds a huge element of fear to the story; something quite rightly that the series pushes to extremes but without spilling into a territory of the grotesque and tarnished.

The addition of Jenna Elfman to the cast as Agent Sylvia Washington adds the dynamic of the defined white saviour complex into the mix, placing her trust not in tradition but facts, logic, and the inherited system as she delves into the suspicious activities surrounding the storyline of the previous series. It is with a sense of authority masked as well-meaning innocence that Ms. Elfman creates a character of tension and possible deceit.

Dark Winds continues to enthral, to educate, and to demonstrate a satisfying bleakness that is relevant to the lived experience of the Native American.

Ian D. Hall