In the first two seasons the cast was also headed by John Oliver as Sergeant Eric Olsen, a white, burnt-out RCMP drug cop from Vancouver, who had requested this posting as a change of pace. His (usually inadvertent) way of misunderstanding the Cree community of Lynx River provided the early plotlines. As he was educated by the community to the very different values and apparently incomprehensible behavior of the “Indians,” so also was the multicultural audience “south of 60.” Olsen was followed by a psychotic white “partner” for Michelle and then by an urban Cree partner. Michelle remained the focus for most of the series.

The series raised many sensitive issues: the abuses of the residential schools and the many forms of selfhatred and anger that resulted; the decimation of the aboriginal way of life in the wake of animal-rights protesters; runaways who head south to Vancouver to become street prostitutes; AIDS; land claims (and anthropologists “working” on those lands); interracial marriages. Alcohol abuse, with its effect on the entire community, and unemployment were running motifs. However, North of 60 was not a series about victims. It was about a community in transition, a community whose core values are threatened but still able to withstand the coming of fax machines and satellite television.

There was truth to the complaint that the series in the early seasons took itself too seriously, lacking the often ambivalent, sometimes oblique, and often very earthy humor characteristic of many First Nations. Subsequent seasons, without Olsen, were a little more lighthearted. Sarah, the white nurse, in a rich and unexpected plot twist, took refuge after a nervous breakdown with Albert, now the chief. Her non sequiturs, together with a generally more confident cast and group of writers, developed a thread of subtle, ironic, and unexpected humor.

The struggles of Michelle, her attempts to befriend her own people while policing them, and her conflicts with her teenage daughter Hannah, created situations any working parent could relate to. Hannah later drowned in a storyline that also introduced Michelle’s new love interest, a counselor and bush pilot, Andrew One Sky. However, the series also created unexpected solutions to the usual domestic problems. For example, rather than simply relying on an unchanging, winning combination of characters, Thomas King’s script gave Peter Kenidi, even with his master’s degree, a reason for staying in Lynx River. An unplanned vision quest is derived from too little sleep, extensive work on the history of the local families and the stories told by the elders, and worry about the offer of a well-paying and influential job in Ottawa. Kenidi has visions of a small boy who eventually wounds him with the stone from a slingshot. As Kenidi comes to see, the “boy” is his younger self running away from residential school—but the cut on his forehead is “real.” This larger sense of reality offers him a reason to become part of the Lynx River community and to try to find his place in it.

These topics, and others like them, explore difficult cultural concerns. Like Cariboo Country in the 1960s and The Beachcombers in the 1970s and 1980s, the 90 episodes of North of 60 used sensitivity and humor to address such issues of cross-cultural contact and conflict, specifically that between mainstream and indigenous cultures. When the series ended, change in the form of oil exploration was on the way. A number of made-for-TV North of 60 movies have followed, with audiences still enjoying new insights into the characters and their culture.