The Vanishing Indian in "True Detective: Night Country"

The conclusion of the fourth season of True Detective on HBO was a mixed bag, at least from the perspective of whether it enacts decolonial or settler colonial agendas.

Indigenous Justice is Decolonial

On the one hand, the show depicts an Inupiaq population solving its problems rather than relying upon the colonial authorities. It also depicts representatives of that colonial authority (however rogue they may be) acquiescing to those Indigenous solutions.

In this sense, the resolution of True Detective: Night Country can be understood as decolonial, in as much as it deviates from the typical structure of narratives about Indian Country when they are created by the dominant culture in the United States. Despite the disapproval the show has received from some TV viewers and critics, we can at least say it depicts Indigenous Sovereignty in a way that is rarely seen in mainstream productions. In this way, we can think of the series as being decolonial.

A colonial narrative would have suggested Indigenous people are incapable of solving their own problems and they need the colonial (white) authorities for that. This suggests the Indigenous characters are inferior to the colonizers, and it suggests that colonization is good, since the colonizers can solve problems that plague the Indigenous community (even when those problems are created by colonization). A decolonial narrative breaks those rules.

The murder that sets everything in motion -- that of an Inupiaq woman who threatened to reveal the secrets of the mining company that is polluting the local water supply -- is solved by women who knew her. The same women are involved in the deaths of the men who killed her, and their deaths are the inciting event for the series. The Inupiaq community solves its own problems in its way.  

The women let the land decide the fate of the guilty men. They do not kill the men; they send the men naked into the night to see if "she" will take them. No one explains who "she" is. Is it the spirit of the woman they killed? Is the spirit something in the ice that the scientists have uncovered? Is the woman they killed an embodiment of that spirit, a continuation of it? Whoever "she" is, she killed the men. They did not freeze to death, we are told; they died of fear or panic, which explains the "corpsicle" they form -- their bodies frozen in mid-scream, knotted together. Freezing to death, we are told, is like going to sleep, not like being tortured.

When Evangeline Navarro (Kail Reis), an Inupiaq state trooper, and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), the white police chief, accept this explanation and help cover it up, they are accepting Inupiaq justice for a crime against an Inupiaq woman and against the land. That is decolonial. 

The Vanishing Indian is Settler Colonialism

On the other hand, the show's finale enacted a trope that is popular in settler colonial narratives: the Vanishing Indian. Despite finding answers to her motivating questions and conflicts, and despite offering some emotional solace to her fellow detective, Navarro walks toward the white horizon in what I assume is a suicidal death similar to her sister's earlier in the season, a surrender to the freezing environment of the Alaskan landscape. A common trope of settler colonial narratives is the Native character who dies or leaves at the end, some times after bestowing their blessing upon the white protagonist.

For my university classes, I provide a brief description of settler colonialism, which is foundational to much U.S. economic, political, and cultural practice: "Settler colonialism is the figurative and literal erasure of Native people and the erasure of the guilt for having done this."

The Vanishing Indian trope serves the purposes of settler colonialism: the Native person is removed from the land, leaving it available for the colonizer to possess. When the Vanishing Indian leaves voluntarily and, even better, gives their blessing to the white colonizers, settler guilt is alleviated. These stories mythologize and romanticize what were actually violent and contested removals.

Imagining actual co-existence between Indian and white communities, imagining settler society truly acknowledging Native rights to the land, requires upsetting the colonial world too much. Even when the stories were written by white authors sympathetic to American Indians, even in stories intended to persuade white Americans to stop abusing Native people, the authors could not imagine a true co-existence between the two groups. Their narrative logic required the departure of the Indian character. (For example, check out Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, published in 1827. No, really. Check it out. Despite its Vanishing Indian trope, it is a fun novel.)

Navarro vanishes. The final scenes of the episode depict investigators questioning Danvers  about the case we have watched unfold, in much the same way as the first season of True Detective involved the investigation of an investigation. They also are asking her about Navarro -- where did she go?

Navarro's death does not clear the land for possession by the colonizers -- in fact, she helps close the polluting mine before she leaves town by recording the confession of a scientist involved with manipulating pollution evidence. This is decolonial in that it imagines frustrating a primary goal of settler colonialism: extraction of resources from Native land.

However, her disappearance at the end left me unsettled. Among the three police officers we have followed throughout -- Navarro, Danvers, and Danvers's protege, Peter Prior (Finn Bennett)-- two have happy endings; only the Native protagonist is not given that.

The story ends happily for Danvers. In the final episode, she is told by Navarro that her dead stepson is watching over her, which gives her some closure. (The "Night Country" of the series title describes the ice caves where the mine's secrets are found and, the story suggests, the land of the dead. This is a land that Navarro has access to, because, you know, Indians are, like, spiritual.) The concluding montage includes Danvers happily sharing a sandwich with her young adult stepdaughter (also Inupiaq), with whom she has been at war for five episodes. The racial/cultural tensions between them seem to have disappeared. This is suggested by the presence of the stepdaughter’s chin tattoo (a “111”); earlier, Danvers had forced Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) to wash off the temporary tattoo she had applied.

We have watched Prior's marriage fall apart for five episodes because of his devotion to the case and his obedience to Danvers's requests. He even kills his own father, whom he learns is a bad cop working for the mining company and who is threatening to shoot Danvers. Despite all of this, in the final episode, his Inupiaq wife takes him back and he is last seen with his toddler son in bed.

Navarro, however, says goodbye to her close relationships and walks away. In her vacated home, she leaves a toy that had belonged to Danvers's stepson; she apparently had retrieved it after Danvers threw it away. At the home of her Inupiaq boyfriend, Navarro returns his SpongeBob toothbrush, a symbol of their connection and domestic possibilities. The potential for an Indigenous family -- Navarro and Qaavik and perhaps their children -- is not imagined. Why not?

One answer may be Issa Perez, the show’s creator, is operating with some settler colonial logic despite trying to imagine stories outside of that. Indian characters can be doomed to vanish because they bear the burden of symbolizing tragedy or spirituality. Perhaps as Perez gestured toward some grander significance in her story, a transcendence of some sort, she chose Navarro to signify that. Even writers attempting to critique settler colonialism (such as Sedgwick, whom I mentioned earlier) use their Native characters to signify that tragedy. Rarely do white characters sacrifice themselves; the Noble Savage does that. Rarely do the white characters depart the scene, vacating the land so its original occupants can continue their lives.

Some people suggest Navarro is not dead, that she did not kill herself in much the same way her younger sister did. However, if she leaves Ennis to be free of the bad memories there, she would probably do that in a car, not in a light jacket and walking across the snow toward the horizon.

The last image of Navarro is of her standing on the porch of what seems to be a vacation home Danvers is visiting in the spring. However, I think the arrangement of the shot suggests she is present but not actually there. Danvers and Navarro are divided in the shot: we see Danvers through the window and Navarro through the doorway. They do not interact significantly. This is consistent with other scenes wherein characters see the ghost or memory of people. Navarro is in the frame with another person, but she is still isolated, alone.

I don’t know.

I am still trying to understand the conclusion of Navarro’s story. That is why this blog entry is called a “hot take”: I might change my mind.

And my speculation here is not about whether I liked the series. I felt it was unsatisfying but for other reasons – not for the story it told but for the way it told the story. It was six episodes long, whereas the otherTrue Detective seasons had eight. Perhaps it needed two more; I think the characters could have been imagined more richly. The interiority and conflicted motivations of characters could have been made more visible. But those thoughts could be saved for a different post.

(This entry was originally published with the title "A Hot Take on True Detective: Night Country.")