Murder is as ubiquitous in “Three Pines,” the noirish Amazon series from the creators of “The Crown,” as the frigid Canadian weather. But as the bodies pile up in a claustrophobic Quebec village, one discovery shakes the fictional community to its foundations: the graves of three dead Indigenous children, surreptitiously hidden in the basement of a former Victorian residential school.
The discovery by Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the morally impeccable detective at the center of the show, is notable because the scene is absent from the Louise Penny books that inspired the series. The scene stands out for another reason, too: It was written a year before Indigenous leaders reported that ground-penetrating radar had uncovered the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children near a residential school in British Columbia in 2021, an announcement that sent convulsions. . Canada.
The creators of “Three Pines,” which came out in early December, have chosen to take Gamache’s beloved character, who acts as Canada’s Hercule Poirot in solving all sorts of mysteries in Penny’s 18 books, and make him the task of to deal with an embarrassing chapter in Canadian history.
From the 1880s to the 1990s, at least 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly sent to residential schools, established by the government and largely administered by the Roman Catholic Church, where they were forbidden to speak their language and faced sexual and physical abuse. abuse.
Penny, the Canadian author who is also an executive producer on the series, said many of the show’s creators were shocked to see art unintentionally imitating life in such a visceral and gruesome way. “When the headlines hit, we were shocked by the discovery and realized this was no longer fiction — it was an ‘Oh My God’ moment,” she recalls.
As Canada grapples with dark chapters from its colonial past, Indigenous cultural observers said the series casts a rare global spotlight on the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples there, a reality that has long been underexposed, obscured or ignored in Canadian popular culture.
The show also comes as Canada, a country that prides itself on cultural diversity, is beset by debates over cultural appropriation and who has the right to depict minorities in film, television and theatre. That question was brought into sharp focus a few years ago when director Robert Lepage was criticized for failing to cast First Nations people from Canada in “Kanata,” a play about their historical suffering.
As in the United States, where television series such as “Rutherford Falls,” “Dark Winds,” and FX’s “Reservoir Dogs” have explored Native American themes, Canada has explored long-buried Native stories. A psychological television drama, “Bones of Crows,” about a residential school survivor, will premiere next year on CBC, the national broadcaster, and there have been musical productions, television series, and films that grapple with Indigenous subjects.
But Jesse Wente, a writer who is the first Indigenous chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, the national arts funding agency, said there is yet to be a mainstream Canadian show with an Indigenous cast and crew and a budget on the scale of Three. Pines. . He viewed the omission as a legacy of colonialism still infecting Canadian culture and ignoring indigenous voices in the country’s narratives.
“We could have made shows like Three Pines in Canada for over a generation, but we just didn’t,” he said.
“Three Pines” turns cultural appropriation on its head, reimagining a white-majority region of Quebec as a vessel of Indigenous suffering and enslavement, as well as empowerment. And it recasts several of Penny’s characters: Isabelle Lacoste is not a white Quebec policewoman, but rather a determined native single mother, while Bea Mayer, who runs a meditation center, is portrayed as a formidable motorcycling native gallery owner, played with raw intensity by the native actress Tantoo Cardinal.
Also integral to the series is Gamache’s investigation into the disappearance and murder of a Mohawk girl, Blue Two-Rivers, who is falsely pinned to a young First Nations man in an extensive police list. The disappearance and murder of Indigenous girls and women is so endemic in Canada that a national investigation has been launched.
Penny has a cult following, including ardent pilgrims who travel to Quebec to follow in Gamache’s footsteps; tampering with the blueprint of the novels was not without risk. “Three Pines lacks the warmth and hospitality I wrap myself in,” lamented a disappointed reader on Penny’s Facebook page. Others lamented that the humor and joy of the books is absent from an unrelentingly dark series.
And while many of the characters from the novels remain, including the misanthropic poet with a pet swearing duck, Penny herself said she was disappointed that the village of Three Pines, “a central character in the books,” became an afterthought in the series. used to be. Nonetheless, she said storylines involving First Nations people in Canada had given the novels new meaning.
The native content was the brainchild of British screenwriter Emilia di Girolamo, the lead writer and executive producer of the series. Di Girolamo said her decision to reinvent Penny’s novels through a different lens was solidified during a research trip to Quebec for the series in 2019, when she read headlines about murdered Indigenous girls.
She was also inspired by a storyline in one of Penny’s novels about a young Cree man who goes missing.
“Louise Penny’s books are all about the dark and the light, and the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples is the dark in Canada right now,” she said.
Di Girolamo said the creative team worked hard to avoid “white redemption” and enlisted 44-year-old director Tracey Deer, who is a native who created the critically acclaimed comedy-drama series “Mohawk Girls” to direct episodes about residential schools. . It also hired several First Nations people in Canada for starring roles and as consultants.
Deer said the strong, three-dimensional native characters drew her to the project. “As a young girl, I never saw anyone like me on the big or small screen,” she said. “All I’ve ever seen was Native Americans with feathers living 400 years ago or portrayed as someone with a drug problem getting killed.”
Nevertheless, she said avoiding “white saviorism” presented an extraordinary challenge, as the series’ main hero and moral center, Gamache, is a middle-aged white man portrayed with searing vulnerability by British actor Alfred Molina. To protect herself from old and familiar colonial conventions, she said she had tried to develop strong indigenous characters who are not victims and retain the power to shape their own identities.
“In the books we have the great Gamache, and he is white and is the lead detective and has all the power,” she said. “The last thing I wanted was another show that fetishizes the suffering of the indigenous people and leaves us in a place of victimization.”
Deer said she had worked to authentically represent the native culture. For example, in one episode, after the remains of children are discovered, mourners are smeared with sage to honor the dead. The original script featured a more Eurocentric candlelight vigil.
Nevertheless, aspects of the plot upset some native cast members, most notably a scene in which Blue Two-Rivers’ mother, desperate at not being able to find her daughter, hurls herself from the roof of a Montreal police station.
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, a member of the Kainai First Nation in Alberta who plays police officer Isabelle Lacoste, complained that no native people had been in the series’ writing room, and she thought the scene was wrong. While suicide is common in some Indigenous communities, Tailfeathers said it didn’t seem realistic to imagine the mother as being so desperate that she would commit suicide. She said she begged the show’s producers to change that part of the script.
“When I see Indigenous women who have lost loved ones, they often fight back, and that was not an accurate portrayal of the women I know,” she explains.
Di Girolamo replied that the suicide scene underscored Gamache’s fallibility. “Gamache completely fails to save Blue,” she said. “It was a powerful moment to show what the police are doing to the indigenous people and their failure to help.”
Tailfeathers said she was initially conflicted about playing a police officer, as the police force in Canada has been criticized as abusive and violent towards Indigenous people; in the past, for example, agents took indigenous children from their homes and took them to residential schools.
But the chance to portray a powerful Indigenous role model left her confused. “I was drawn to Lacoste’s complexity, her tenacity and her strength,” she said.
Still, she said the raw depiction of real-life trauma had triggered her at times, as her own maternal grandparents had been sent to residential schools. To help the cast deal with grief or trauma, an Indigenous therapist was on set.
Despite its staunch portrayal of Canadian law enforcement, “Three Pines” has drawn praise from some Québécois police officers, who have praised its stark realism.
Marcel Savard, a former deputy chief and 40-year veteran of the Sûreté du Québec, Quebec’s provincial police force, for which Gamache works on the books, said he appreciated the inspector’s ruthlessness and humanity.
“Gamache can run out of wires or run into a wall, but it never lets down the indigenous victims,” he said. “He made me feel proud.”
