Echo director Sydney Freeland on Marvel's 'first deaf Native American badass'

Q23:03Sydney Freeland: Echo, Marvel’s first “deaf Native American badass,” and the importance of getting a Chocktaw story right

There's a new miniseries out now that's unlike anything else you've seen before on TV. It's called Echo, and it's the first story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to focus on a deaf Native American lead character.

Echo has all the hallmarks of a typical Marvel production, such as intense action scenes and funny moments, but what makes it different is that the story is told through the completely silent perspective of the main character, Maya Lopez, better known as Echo. It also features a lot of American Sign Language.

Sydney Freeland is the director of the miniseries. She says she became aware of Echo a few years after the character was first introduced by Marvel Comics in 1998. "Because there's so little Native American representation, you kind of hear about every character [who's Native American]," she tells Q's Tom Power in an interview.

In the comic books, Echo is described as a member of the Blackfeet Nation in the U.S., but Freeland says she's "Blackfeet in name only."

"There's some very cool Native American imagery and iconography [in the comic books], but it's just that — it's just cool imagery. There isn't specificity behind it. And that's not a fault of the illustrators or the writers of the comic book … but I think that was one of the things that really jumped out at me, it's like, 'Oh, this is a very just sort of generic pan-Indigenous expression of a character."

As a Navajo writer and director, Freeland was excited to take on the project and make some much-needed changes.

"When you first come on board a project like this, you pitch to the studio your vision, your intent with the series, and how it's going to look and feel," she says.

"In one of the first conversations with [executive producer Kevin Feige], I sort of explained to him, like, 'Listen, I grew up reading comic books and I grew up going to powwows, but those two things never overlapped or intersected with each other. So to have the chance to smash those two aspects of my personal experience together was an incredibly exciting and surreal sort of moment. And the response was like, 'Yes, lean into that. All those things. Go, go, go.'"

WATCH | Official trailer for Echo:

In the miniseries, Echo is from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Freeland consulted and built a relationship with the community to help bring the story to life.

"The response from the Choctaw Nation has been overwhelmingly positive," she says.

"One of the things I'm most jealous of is actually Chief [Gary] Batton, who's the chief of the Choctaw Nation … We screened during their annual powwow, and at the powwow, he addressed the 1,200 people that were in attendance, and he says, 'You know, I just had the chance to watch the first couple episodes of Marvel's new series Echo. And I'm not going to say this is Marvel's first Native American hero [or] the first Native American villain. This is Marvel's first deaf Native American badass.'"

Echo can be streamed now on Disney+ and Hulu.

The full interview with Sydney Freeland is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Sydney Freeland produced by Kaitlyn Swan.