Skinwalkers & Dark Winds (My rating: 5+)
Two excellent series with Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn & Jim Chee
Okay, this is another not-British mystery. I’ll return to them. But the shows covered here are deeply human, great examples of detective fiction, and brought to the screen with great care. Oklahoma-born Tony Hillerman (not a Native American) wrote 18 books featuring Navajo Nation Policeman Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I’ve not read the books but have watched two different TV versions based on them.
The first was the three 90-minute episodes produced 2002-04 by Robert Redford. Wes Studie (of the Cherokee Nation) played Lt. Leaphorn with Adam Beach (of the Plains Ojibwe) playing Chee. All Navajo characters were played by Native Americans including Sheila Tousey as Leaphorn’s wife Emma and the excellent and very versatile Graham Greene as conman Slick Nakai. (If you haven’t seen Greene as the explosives “expert” in the Red Green show, you’re missing something.) Native American Chris Eyre directed.
I first watched the shows on PBS Mystery and recently re-watched Coyote Waits and A Thief of Time on YouTube. My search for the first episode – Skinwalkers – turned up the last 2/3s (which I watched after catching up on the book version.) The shows are worth looking for (and can be found on Amazon). Studie is just excellent as the quiet, intense detective brought up in the white man world and urban police forces but deeply Navajo and in love with his wife. Leaphorn is drawn into investigations uncovering the currents and traditions of Native American culture. Jim Chee, deeply immersed in Navajo culture, is studying to be a traditional healer. He accepts the possibility of mystical elements in the crimes that Leaphorn refuses to credit.
Dark Winds, the new TV version of Leaphorn and Chee, began in June 2022 on AMC. Robert Redford is again an executive producer along with George R.R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame). Redford apparently has a long-running interest in adapting the books, staring with a film in 1991, and Martin knew Hillerman. All the Navajo characters are again played by Native Americans. Deanna Allison, a Navajo speaker, plays Leaphorn’s wife Emma.
The previous series stayed close to the books. But now, Lt. Leaphorn is the head of a local Navajo Police unit. Zahn McClarnon (part Lakota) is as good as Studie in the role (and previously played the chief of Cheyenne tribal police in Longmire.) Kiowa Gordon plays Chee, who emerges first an FBI agent and winds up a private eye before settling as a Navajo police officer as in the books. Jessica Matten stars brightly as Sgt. Bernadette Manuelito.
The series has had two excellent seasons – revolving around the death of Leaphorn’s son some years before, spread out over 12 fifty-minute episodes – with a third planned for 2025. It is more violent and bloody than I usually watch. But the cast and plots are too good to miss, with special emphasis on reflecting the reality and culture of the Navajo (Diné). (The writers are all Native Americans.) The sensitive treatment of Native American life in the 1970s, and the New Mexico scenery, makes it worth while.
I give both versions a 5+.