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Dark Winds Draws New Border Lines
Season three’s ending for Bernadette limits her individual ambition while broadening her — and the series’ — perspective on Native justice.
“Béésh Łį́į́ (Iron Horse)” brings Bernadette from Hachita, New Mexico, back home to the Navajo reservation, using her disappointing stint within a compromised U.S. Border Patrol to make its strongest case yet for Indigenous separatism, an idea the series started out rejecting but increasingly presents as the only dignified option for Native people in a white-power world. Businessmen like Vines and Spenser, government employees Henry and FBI agent Sylvia Washington (Jenna Elfman), the unnamed priest who sexually abused Joe’s cousin in their childhood, the archeology professor who kills a Native teen to protect his misguided theory about Navajo history — they each see Indigenous culture as a kind of commodity or opportunity, rather than something distinct to be respected on its own terms. Kali Reis ’s Trooper Evangeline Navarro in True Detective: Night Country and Lily Gladstone’s Officer Cam Bentland in Under the Bridge were both positioned by their departments to show their bosses cared about missing and murdered girls and women of color, but neither woman was allowed to investigate the case the way she wanted.
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