When production started on the new Marvel TV series Echo, it began with a traditional native blessing ceremony for the cast and crew, followed by a traditional Choctaw hymn.
"It set a tone," actor Chaske Spencer, who plays Uncle Henry on the series, told ABC News. "We all knew what we're going to do here and we were in a special project and when you have a ceremony like that, it just puts good vibes in the air."
What is Echo about?
Echo is the first Marvel show led by a Native American cast. It also prominently features sign language.
The central character in Echo is Maya Lopez, played by Alaqua Cox, who was born deaf and is an amputee.
In Echo, Maya flees home to Oklahoma's Choctaw Nation, pursued by supervillain Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio), the head of a criminal empire she once worked for.
There she has to contend with her past and the family ties that have broken down since she was forced to leave the community as a child.
Maya was introduced in the Disney+ series Hawkeye as an antihero, but you don't need to watch that series first — Echo is designed as a standalone, five-episode series.
She leads a cast that also includes Devery Jacobs as Maya's cousin Bonnie, Chaske Spencer as her uncle Henry, Zahn McClarnon and Cody Lightning.
"I wanted to show people that amputees and people with disabilities can do anything," Cox said in the series' production brief.
"Although I am deaf and an amputee, I was able to do a lot of my fighting and stunts and it was important to me to show my prosthetic leg and not try to hide it under clothes … I wanted people with disabilities to have someone that they could look up to and see within themselves."
The Disney+ show is the first to debut under the "Marvel Spotlight'' banner, a new category of Marvel shows focused on character-driven stories.
How they got the details right
Prior to filming, Jacobs travelled to the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma, where she learnt about Choctaw creation stories and history.
"So many people think 'Native American' as this one nation or one tribe and that's just not the case. In the US alone, there's over 562 — those are just the federally recognised tribes," she told ABC News.
"We have different languages and cultures — I'm Mohawk and so for us to make sure this was rooted in the Choctaw Nation and that we were doing this in collaboration with the Choctaw Nation was so important, especially when it came to the specificities of the language and culture from that territory."
Themes of family and ancestral history are threaded into the plot. "I thought the fact that there were so many references to small-town communities, and everyone knows everyone, and everyone's somehow related to each other, was super-relatable [to] growing up on my res [reservation]," Jacobs said.
"That was part of the fabric of the world and part of involving Indigenous creators behind the project of Echo — feeling those nuances and feeling that relatable aspects of what it means to be growing up in an Indigenous community."
Both Devery Jacobs and Spencer learnt American Sign Language for their roles, and worked with ASL Master Doug Ridloff (who also worked on the Marvel movie Eternals).
Ridloff translated the script line by line and got the actors to mimic the translations back to him. "After a while, you start to develop muscle memory, and it starts to come quicker and quicker," Spencer said.
Filming a genuine powwow
Spencer said one of the most memorable days on set was when they filmed a powwow, which is a gathering held by Native American communities to dance, sing, and socialise.
"I don't want to give too much away, but you know there's a powwow and you really felt like we hit it home," he said. "You don't get to see powwows being filmed like that, especially in a big budget show like this. It was very authentic. And I've been to some powwows in our time. And I gotta say, it looked completely real to me."
Jacobs said dancers from across the country congregated in Georgia for the shoot.
"Everybody gave their all and danced through the night," Jacobs said. "And it was take after take, but I think everybody wanted to get it right, and to be proud and show that culture and those communities on screen, on a platform that hasn't been shown before."
Jacobs added that the welcoming ceremony at the start of production served as an important reminder that they were guests in other people's territory. (Notably, the Marvel film Thor: Love and Thunder directed by Taika Waititi, had a Welcome to Country ceremony on set during filming in Sydney.)
"I know that we're working with like huge movie stars, and we're working with people who might be considered on like a hierarchy, but it gets everyone onto the same playing field and, and making sure that there's respect and that we're all telling the story from, from a good place," she explained.
Echo is streaming on Disney+.