Tazbah Chavez, the WGA-nominated “Reservation Dogs” writer and director, grew up attending environmental justice protests that aimed to protect Indigenous lands. As a citizen of the Bishop Paiute Tribe four hours outside of Los Angeles and daughter to a climate journalist, the creative — who helmed and co-wrote Tuesday’s episode of Fox’s “Accused” — said she wanted to bring her background as an activist fighting for Native rights to the small screen.
“’Naataanii’s Story’ is emblematic, first and foremost, of the frustration and anger that a lot of young people face when we try to protect Native homelands from being contaminated by destructive industries and unwise developments, and it’s reflecting the passion of our people to see justice,” Chavez told TheWrap in an interview. “Institutions like federal, state, local, global and corporate players ignore the needs and the rights of Native families.”
The anthology crime series, developed by Howard Gordon and based on the 2010 British format of the same name, takes the viewer through the defendant’s perspective of the act that led to their eventual trial. In “Naataanii’s Story,” a group of Navajo friends are arrested for protesting a local uranium mine that has poisoned their community. The guest cast includes Robert I. Mesa, Natalie Benally, Kiowa Gordon, Forrest Goodluck, Deanna Allison and Lindsay G. Merrithew.
Chavez spoke with TheWrap about the episode’s creation and ending (spoilers follow), what she hopes audiences take away from the story and shared an update on “Rez Dogs” Season 3.
TheWrap: How did you get involved with this project and what’s it been like working with Howard Gordon to bring this story to life on screen?
TC: I met Howard Gordon through a WGA speed dating with showrunners type of thing that the Native and Indigenous Writers Committee at the Guild had set up, where we got to choose our top four showrunners we’d like to meet and just have a connection with, and he was one of them. So I had 15 minutes with him, I was in a trailer shooting “Rez Dogs,” and then a year later he came back, which was a year ago now, and told me about this show and told me about an episode that they had an idea for, and asked if I was interested in doing it, and I was like, “absolutely.”
It’s been really wonderful working with Howard because he really let me take an idea that they had and make it personal and make it authentic and he really, truly handed over the keys to the ship. He really handed over the creative control, the co-writing I got to do with Chip Johannessen and into the directing. There was no pushback, there was no point that I couldn’t say something, I couldn’t speak to something or couldn’t depict something in a certain way. And I really appreciate that because I think that a lot of creatives want to bring diverse stories forward, but not everyone is handing over that much creative control to those communities.
Could you talk about the inspiration behind this story, your personal experiences and the reality of protecting Native land today, as we’ve seen with the Keystone Pipeline and other events?
Chip and Howard had come to me with a story that Chip had laid out, and they knew that they wanted it to be around an environmental justice issue. When I entered the chat, I chose to highlight uranium mining on the Navajo Nation as an example of the ongoing environmental racism and injustice facing Native people, both in the past and the present. For decades, the Navajo Nation was a primary source for U.S. uranium stockpile, so it created 700 mines on the Navajo Nation, with jobs, but that resulted in the poisoning of the land, the air, the water, the people and this eventually led to the largest radioactive spill in U.S. history in Church Rock in 1979. And this contaminated a river that ran through the Navajo Nation that contaminated groundwater for families who use it for drinking, irrigation, livestock. So while this happened then, it’s still a current issue because 40 years later, the contamination still hasn’t been adequately cleaned up. And so residents continue to face illness, tainted water, loss of livestock. It’s the largest radioactive spill that never ended.
For me, when I came into this, I’m Navajo, my mom is Navajo, she’s from Fort Defiance [in Apache County in Arizona]. This was something that I’ve always known about and my mother is a former environmental journalist, so I was raised in a household with a lot of activism. I spent most of my spring breaks at protests, for Yucca Mountain nuclear waste sites [in Nevada]. When they came to me with this, I was very excited because I’m really passionate about this, but I didn’t want to do the ones that were getting the most recognition because there’s so many more. In the present, it’s not just uranium: You can look at Thacker Pass [where] there’s a quest to mine lithium for batteries. You have the Havasu tribe in the Grand Canyon, [where] a company wants to start mining uranium again. And then you have Oak Flats and the Apache and there’s a Canadian copper mining company that wants to come in. There’s a lot of environmental injustice activity happening in the West. I wanted to take this opportunity to use a story like uranium, but put it in the present, so that people understand this is not the past; this is representative of what continues to go on.
This episode also delves into the systemic failures of the judicial process, so could you discuss exploring the idea of justice when there are roadblocks against protecting vulnerable communities?
‘Naataanii’s Story’ is emblematic, first and foremost, of the frustration and anger that a lot of young people face when we try to protect Native homelands from being contaminated by destructive industries and unwise developments, and it’s reflecting the passion of our people to see justice. Institutions like federal, state, local, global and corporate players ignore the needs and the rights of Native families. There is a legacy and a responsibility that young Native people have been instilled with by their communities to carry forward protecting the land that we all need to have in good health in order for us humanity to exist, but it also highlights the discrimination issues with the United States justice system, and that it has separate stricter laws for Native people. Because Native tribes have different legal jurisdiction, in many states they answer first the federal government before state, and what happens is that under things like the Major Crimes Act for felonies, sentencing for Native people is harsher and longer than state statutes, and so this results in Native people being incarcerated at higher rates.
The legal system in this country doesn’t work for everyone, [but] this country is aligned with sovereign nations who operate under their own legal jurisdictions that are compatible for the cultures and people they serve. This episode does a lot of things, hitting on a lot of issues, and I’m hoping that people will walk away mostly with curiosity; I hope that people walk away wanting to do some research on their own.
Derrick’s leaving of the reservation is a point of contention with the group, which is a dynamic also explored in ‘Rez Dogs.’ How did you approach crafting this character that’s caught in a hard place and betrays his friends but is also someone that can be empathized with?
The way [Native people] have been portrayed has been so flattened that I think sometimes talking to viewers or even non-Native folks that we could want to do something different, as though going to college or getting a degree or wanting to get off the reservation that that’s not something that a lot of us think about and a lot of us do, but it’s also not in rejection of our people or our culture. It’s a similar desire in that rural kids want to have a mall or want to go out into the world and experience things. And then you also have this other side of the coin where there are other folks at home who are our culture keepers, they are learning our languages, they are so important, so vital to the survival of our ways. You have to have both dynamics, both sides of the coin, and I think that sometimes those can brush up against each other.
It’s not an unusual experience. I live in L.A. but my rez is about four hours from here and I’m there as much as possible. I split my time between the two and whenever I was [there], I was like ‘Oh, I know I like it here,’ and I go back and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, but I don’t want to leave here,’ and it’s always a struggle, and I think that’s honestly the underlying tenets of colonization. You have a desire to be where you’re from and with your people, and yet you’re expected to operate in the world that was created around you.
About the ending, how did you ultimately settle on the recording bringing the FBI agent to justice, especially with the bailiff who orchestrated it being called a sellout earlier in the episode?
We always wanted this bailiff to be an unexpected hero, and I think she’s a character who — first of all, the actress Jennifer Podemski [who also plays Willie Jack’s mother in ‘Rez Dogs’] to give us the time of day to play that role is such an honor. Oftentimes, we are put in these positions where you work a job or you’re in a role that causes you to have to make tough choices. And I think she’s probably stood in that courtroom year after year after year and watched shady things happen. This, I think, was her final straw and that this is not right. She knows this isn’t what happened. I wanted the ending to be aspirational because it doesn’t happen that often. The way that these things go, you don’t get the good news, the mine isn’t shut down, there isn’t accountability for collusion. And in this world that we created in the story, I really wanted there to be an aspirational outcome of the possibility that somebody is held accountable for this, that there is justice served because we just so often don’t get to see it. So whether it happens in real life or not, I’m hoping that there can be some power felt in ‘This is what it could be like.’
When can we expect Season 3 of ‘Reservation Dogs’?
The writers room is over, it already came and went. Production is starting March 20. I’m leaving March 8 to go to Tulsa and start production.
Each season we’ve had pretty much the same schedule. These last two seasons, we came out like late August, early September. That would be my guess. But yeah, it’s gonna be a fun season.
“Accused” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Fox. Available to stream on Hulu.
