(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Tuesday’s “New Amsterdam.”)
“New Amsterdam” gave Dr. Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold) yet another impossible problem to solve with this week’s episode of the NBC medical drama, which saw Max and the staff grapple with the historic name of the New York City hospital and the brutal past that the New Amsterdam moniker conjures up for a Native American patient of Lenape descent.
TheWrap spoke with “New Amsterdam” staff writer Shanthi Sekaran about what she and showrunner David Schulner were trying to explore with the episode, which features Tantoo Cardinal (“Stumptown,” “Dances With Wolves”) playing professor Jane Munsee, a Native American woman who has a large blood clot in her leg but refuses treatment at New Amsterdam because of what its name represents to her as a Native woman whose people lost their land to the Dutch colonizers who renamed it New Amsterdam.
See our Q&A with Sekaran below about Max’s efforts to right the wrongs made against Jane’s people by trying to change New Amsterdam’s name — and that special moment he shared with Helen Sharpe (Freema Agyeman) at the end of the episode.
Where did the idea for this story about a Native American professor who refuses medical treatment at New Amsterdam because of its name come from?
We knew, [showrunner] David Schulner and I, we knew that we wanted to explore something having to do with Native American health, and our first thought was to go with something we’d been reading about, the Diné tribe, out west, also known as the Navajo tribe. But that didn’t make sense for a New York setting, because there is no reasonable reason that Diné people would come from out west to…