But even a handful of shows with prominent indigenous characters (including Yellowstone, which will be back in the late fall, and mostly dips into its own talent pool) is an enormous leap forward, especially when most of them employ enough Native writers and directors to provide an insiders’ view, rather than the medium’s long tradition of seeing indigenous people through the eyes of white people, when it bothered to see them at all. (He even shared scenes in one episode with Wes Studi!) Elva Guerra has played roles of varying sizes in all three series, including in Dark Winds as a pregnant teen who gets caught up in Leaphorn and Chee’s investigations. Before signing on to play the new Joe Leaphorn in Dark Winds, Zahn McClarnon was winning laughs as a much more dim-witted lawman on Reservation Dogs.

It’s still a fairly small circle of talent being given opportunities, as all three of these shows share writers and/or actors. And FX’s wonderful Reservation Dogs, about a quartet of indigenous teens on a reservation in rural Oklahoma, will be back in August. Peacock’s Rutherford Falls, a comedy about the friendship between a WASP son of privilege and a Native woman who has had to struggle for everything she’s gotten, begins its second season next week.

The new Dark Winds arrives this weekend as the first of a trio of summer shows focused on indigenous characters and featuring largely indigenous casts. (Graham Greene would have been the other.) And Wes Studi was basically one of two options who could have been hired to play Leaphorn.

Adam Beach was basically the only Native actor under 40 to appear regularly on the big and small screen in the early part of the 21st century, so of course he was going to play Chee. While it was exciting to see an under-represented group at the center of a familiar genre, it was also a sign of Hollywood’s limited imagination when it came to telling stories about indigenous characters. Twenty years ago, PBS made a trio of TV-movies adapted from Hillerman’s books, starring Wes Studi as veteran detective Joe Leaphorn and Adam Beach as his young partner Jim Chee. AMC’s new drama Dark Winds, based on Tony Hillerman’s bestselling series of buddy-cop mystery novels set on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, is not the first television attempt at the property.

Listening Woman by Tony Hillerman