[Source: AP]

Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin are the big names behind “Dark Winds,” but they’re not the most important.

That distinction belongs to the Native American creators and actors who ensured the AMC mystery series rings true to the Native experience and enduring culture, which largely has been snubbed or recklessly caricatured by Hollywood.

This time the storytelling is “an inside job,” said director Chris Eyre, resulting in what he describes as a “Native American, Southwestern film noir.”

Based on Tony Hillerman’s admired novels featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, AMC’s “Dark Winds” puts the newly teamed lawmen on a double-murder case that could be linked to a brazen armored-car heist.

The investigation and what underlies it is gripping but, as with Hillerman’s books, what distinguishes “Dark Winds” is its intricate blend of nuanced characters and relationships, spiritual traditions and the devastating toll of entrenched inequality.

The last aspect is painfully illustrated by a midwife’s warning to a pregnant woman to avoid a hospital birth or risk unwanted sterilization, a reflection of what Native Americans faced in the series’ 1970s setting, the producers said. (A 1976 U.S. General Accounting Office study found that women under 21 were being sterilized despite a moratorium, among other issues.)