“It was having that backstory and the expertise and having people from Oklahoma that could really build out that experience. “One of our primary writers, Stephen Paul Judd, is from the Choctaw Nation, and they have a very rich history and backstory, as do all Native cultures,” Freeland continues.

“One of the first things that we did was, ‘Okay, this is Choctaw, all roads lead here.’ And then we build out from that.” Having read the comics, Freeland commented on the “hodgepodge' of Native imagery from different tribes that made for a “muddied, inauthentic backstory for the character” that she wanted to avoid in this series. In Echo, Maya is part of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma (a change from her Cheyenne Nation comic origins). Then we tried to keep that energy going, but we had Native people throughout the behind-the-scenes and front of the camera as well.” So it really started within our writer's room.

Those were two things that I grew up that were so integrated into my personality and my experience, but those two never overlapped.”įreeland went on to discuss the necessity of authenticity in Echo, “We had to have Native representation. That's how common an event it was for me. “Powwows to me were like somebody in Anaheim going to Disneyland. Pitching herself to Kevin Feige for the job, she simply told him, “‘I grew up reading comic books, and I grew up going to powwows.’” She continues. “Not Image, not DC, not Dark Horse, not Malibu, I grew up reading Marvel,” she notes. Marvel Studios’ Head of Streaming, Television and Animation, Brad Winderbaum, welcomed the press and revealed two noteworthy firsts for Echo: it would be the first Marvel Studios-produced television series to be rated TV-MA, and also the first Marvel series simultaneously released on Disney+ and Hulu.įreeland, who is of Native American descent and grew up on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, grew up a major Marvel comics fan. It has already been announced that Echo will be released all at once in January, after being pushed back from November. It's not the fate of the universe at stake. “We're operating a little bit more on a street-level view. “This show is sort of an exploration of trauma, how we deal with it, how we cope with it, how it affects us, how we affect it, how it affects those around us,” Freeland explains. The clips show Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) at different points of her life, from a fateful childhood accident that altered her family’s fate, to shortly after her father William (Zahn McClarnon) passed away, to the present day in a skating rink.

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