According to THR, Ava DuVernay is currently working on a series for NBC centered on a Native American family.
There has never before been a show of its kind of network television.
The upcoming project has been titled Sovereign, comes courtesy of DuVernay’s Array Filmworks and Warner Bros. TV.
Writer and exec producer Sydney Freeland is a member of the Navajo Nation, and co-EP Bird Runningwater belongs to the Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache Tribal Nations and grew up on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, the publication reports.
“The potential series chronicles the lives, loves and loyalties of a sprawling Indigenous family struggling to control the future of their tribe against outside forces and themselves.”
During an interview with The New York Times in July, DuVernay spoke about the lack of diversity and underlying racism in Hollywood.
“It’s a system that I work within. It’s not a community as it relates to the problem you’re talking about. It’s a system like the criminal justice system. It’s a system like the health care system, the education system. It is the Hollywood system, the entertainment system, the way we create images. It’s a system that is over a hundred years old, and it’s built on a foundation of racism, exclusion and patriarchy,” she mused.
“So, at this point, I think of it less like “rally the community,” or “how do you change people’s minds.” Changing people’s minds doesn’t matter if those changed minds are working within a system that’s still diseased. It’s just a Band-Aid. So the way I approach it is, yes, you want to create awareness, you want to educate people, you want to make people be less ignorant to the nuances of living in skin of color and as a woman — but, ultimately, the systems that we all work in are harmful to a healthy industry. We need to be thinking more broadly about how we not just reform that system but rebuild the system.”
