Dark Winds Draws New Border Lines

Spoilers follow for Dark Winds through third-season finale “Béésh Łį́į́ (Iron Horse),” which premiered on AMC on Sunday, April 27. 

In its third season, Dark Winds went bigger, both narratively and geographically. Where the first two seasons concentrated on the Navajo reservation and the crimes and mysteries investigated there by Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten); Navajo Police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon), her father figure and boss; and Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), her co-worker and love interest, the third sprawled. Human and drug trafficking at the Mexican border took up a significant chunk of the plot; characters ignored rules of jurisdiction and traveled to Mexico to snoop around; a stand-alone episode dug into Leaphorn’s past. All of that fed into one of Dark Winds’s thematic obsessions since its first season: What is “justice,” and how do Native people get it in a world where they’re so often curtailed?

Third-season finale “Béésh Łį́į́ (Iron Horse)” answers that question for Leaphorn in a way that maintains the character’s roguish qualities (although it costs Joe his marriage, he gets away with retributively killing businessman B.J. Vines for murdering Joe’s son). Through a changed Bernadette, though, the series offers a more complicated answer about its ideological priorities moving forward. “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.

Dark Winds has always positioned Leaphorn, Chee, and Bernadette as a sort of spectrum of Native conservatism versus radicalism, with complicating factors like time spent in the military, faith in the supernatural, and adherence to Native customs affecting where they fall. Of the trio, Bernadette was written as the strictest rule-follower — possibly even the most narrow-minded. Part of this was a function of her being a woman in law enforcement; she couldn’t bend the rules in the same way as Leaphorn or Chee. But Dark Winds emphasizes her rigidity most when it comes to questions of “service,” like in season two, when a Native teen gets drafted for Vietnam and her initial instinct is to diminish his (legitimate) concerns about fighting for a country “that doesn’t even recognize me as an American” and instead repeat her belief that “it’s our duty to serve when we’re called.”

Bernadette leans into the “American” aspect of her identity more so than either Leaphorn or Chee, and that tendency fueled her decision at the end of season two to leave the reservation for a job with U.S. Border Patrol. A federal position, she thought, would be an equalizer, giving her greater legitimacy and influence than she could ever have within the Navajo Police. (Season one established that this didn’t work out for Chee, who left the FBI because he felt tokenized, but now it’s Bernadette’s turn to learn for herself.) The series frames Bernadette’s choice as a noble one to “find my own way,” even if it’s not one Joe really understands. By protecting the U.S. border from incoming threats, she’s maintaining a sense of order that is seemingly aligned with her commitment to law enforcement, and because Congress has passed a law to hire Native officers for U.S. Border Patrol, she expects to be aligned with people who share her background and her ideals.

How wonderful that Dark Winds doesn’t play that way or go a simple “representation matters” route. Instead, most of Bernadette’s assumptions — that working the border is an honorable act, or that a federal position will imbue her with more authority, or that all Native people will have the same opinions and the same goals — are upended over the course of the season. Her bust of a Mexican mother and daughter crossing into the country makes her reconsider whether she’s really a hero. Her white boss, Border Patrol senior chief Ed Henry (Terry Serpico), is in cahoots with white ranch owner Tom Spenser (Bruce Greenwood), who with Henry’s help is trafficking cocaine and abducted people over the border. And the Native co-workers Bernadette thought she could rely on both end up being in on the scheme: her fellow female agent and landlord Eleanda Garza (Tonantzin Carmelo), who pulls a gun on her and leaves her to die, and her love interest Ivan Muños (Alex Meraz), who Bernadette worries seduced her at Henry’s command.

Dark Winds doesn’t dive into why Eleanda and Ivan chose to break bad, so it’s unclear if they too were once like Bernadette, convinced that going federal would give them legitimacy they couldn’t get working either on their reservations or elsewhere in the country. Maybe they decided that money was more important to them than legality; maybe this is their own personal way of rebelling against the system. What’s more important than the why, though, is the pattern Dark Winds uses these characters to establish: of the corrupted nature of the U.S. government and the smug untouchability of its allies and actors. As the series’ second and third seasons have explored the concept of “white man’s justice” versus “Indian justice,” its white characters have nearly uniformly represented a world intent on overtaking or undercutting Indigenous life. 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. Eleanda and Ivan feel like the end products of that influence, of spending too much time in a non-Native world and losing oneself.

In the final moments of “Béésh Łį́į́ (Iron Horse),” when Bernadette turns in Henry and Eleanda, leaves U.S. Border Patrol, and returns to her position with Navajo Police, she’s not just retreating to a place and people she knows and trusts but rejecting her previous belief that the U.S. government could provide the validity she craves. All Bernadette needs, she can find on the reservation, with its “Indian justice” and its cloistered community. In this, Dark Winds echoes two different shows from last year that also featured Native female detectives walking away from the job. 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. In the final minutes of their respective series, they quit, frustrated with being treated like diversity hires and obedient foot soldiers. Dark Winds doesn’t go exactly that way — Bernadette leaves Border Patrol only, not policing overall — yet it does share with those series a curiosity about what it costs to follow an order versus refuse one, especially for women who put so much of themselves into a job they thought would make the world a better place. Dark Winds’s ending for Bernadette this season limits her individual ambition, but it empowers her growing confidence in Native self-governance, even isolationism, a shift in characterization that opens up new possibilities for the series’ already-ordered fourth season.

It’s unclear how Bernadette’s realization will affect her broader political ideology going forward — hopefully our girl finally realizes that the Vietnam War is wrong! But it’s a fascinating turn for Dark Winds to take, given that in the series’ first season, the primary villains were a group of Native separatists called the Buffalo Society who believed in consolidating land under Navajo ownership and robbing banks and killing their enemies to get their way. At that time, Dark Winds wasn’t particularly sympathetic to the disenfranchised veterans and their cause, describing them as “bad Indians doing bad shit.” With time, though, the series has seemed to soften that stance. The Buffalo Society turned out to be right about white men causing that mining explosion; they turned out to be right about America’s “imperialistic, capitalist, settlement culture” being dangerous to the Navajo. By acknowledging the reasonableness of that perspective, but also introducing characters like the nefarious Eleanda and Ivan, Dark Winds enriches and complicates its depiction of Native politics past just what we know through Bernadette, Leaphorn, and Chee. “We have a border here, Bernie,” Leaphorn said to his surrogate daughter in season two when she told him about her plan to leave home, and more and more, Dark Winds leans toward suggesting that border is best used to keep white people out. The question now that Bernadette’s back is what she’s willing to do to defend it.

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