Cara Gee is set to reprise her role as no-nonsense ship captain Camina Drummer in the upcoming fourth season of The Expanse, and the Ontario-raised actress has revealed that her character's story arc dives into subject matter that hits deeply close to home.

In The Expanse, Gee's character holds a fierce pride in her Belter heritage: the mainly working-class group of people are born and live in the Asteroid Belt or on the moons of the outer planets, and they're often looked down upon by the likes of the Martians and Earthers because, culturally, they simply don't fit in. Cara Gee happens to be Ojibwe (a large group of indigenous peoples in Canada) and much like what may happening to the Belters, many parts of their culture was sacrificed in order to simply survive in a world dominated by other societies.

Related: The Expanse: Season 4 Is A Blood-Soaked Gold Rush

The upcoming fourth season of The Expanse will see Gee's character go through the same struggle that impacted the Ojibwe: the season four trailers already show that Camina Drummer and the rest of the Belter crew aboard the Behemoth (or Medina Station, if you will) are all wearing uniforms now, which is an idea that Gee's character had openly mocked in season three as a step away from their Belter identity. Uniforms are an idea that make the Belters more accepted by the Earthers and the Martians, but it comes at the sacrifice of their own cultural identity.

As it turns out, Gee and her family are no strangers to making such sacrifices:

I happen to be Ojibwe. That’s my nation. Looking at that question as ‘how much do you assimilate and for what gain?’, you know, and that’s a conversation that’s been generations deep in my family. Some of that assimilation is to survive. You know, my Granny didn’t teach her kids the language because at that time your kids would be taken if they spoke the language at school, and that’s in the ‘50s in Canada that we’re talking about. My family survived by picking and choosing which parts of the culture to take and to keep secret, and so to have that conversation in the show and look at what we were wearing, and what does that mean, that’s a conversation that continued on into this season.

Gee's family is far from the only one impacted by the existences of such culture-erasing schools in Canada, the last of which only closed in 1996. Her Grandma may have been the last one in her family to speak Ojibwe, but Gee takes inspiration for how hard she fought for her culture's rights: her grandmother fought for and won the right to vote in the 1960s, was involved in protesting laws that threatened to take away aboriginal status from women if they married non-native men, and even had former Prime Minister Jean Chretien over for dinner when he was the Indian Affairs Minister.

The Aurora-raised actress promises that the seeds of this discussion planted in the third season of The Expanse about cultural assimilation will pay off throughout the show's fourth season:

It looks at what our relationship to the inner planets is, and how do we have any sovereignty as an oppressed people, and how far are we willing to go to get it, and what does that mean? I think that’s a conversation that we planted the scene for in that episode, and it really blossoms and becomes more complicated as we go.

It won't just be Belters facing questions about cultural identity, either: with an entire new frontier of settlements available through the ring that was opened in season three, the status quo for for the Earthers and Martians will be up in the air, too. As with any shift in power, blood will be spilled - viewers can safely expect the upcoming season of The Expanse to be nothing short of a blood-soaked gold rush, which once again closely echoes human history in a similar way to Dummer's own character arc.

The fourth season of The Expanse will be Gee's third season with the show. Fans have long praised her performances as Camina Drummer, though the Canadian actress reveals that her heritage has led to her being passed over for roles before. To that end, she says that The Expanse is a good example of casting that is devoid of tokenism:

It shows what is possible when we look at people as individuals. You get to bring their complexities to something. We have a richer show for it. You know, miraculously , people can tell us apart. Which is such bullshit, but it’s something that I have heard! We love you for this role, but there’s already a half-asian women in the show. I’ve heard that feedback before. And it’s a real thing that is really happening in this industry in this day and age, and I think we’re just smashing through that and showing how it can work. How actual diversity works, and it’s not tokenism.

For its part, The Expanse has a wide and diverse number of females on the show, and it doesn't grandstand on things like women in power or cultural representation -in the world of The Expanse, it's not exactly an issue of the future. Of course, the upcoming season will see Drummer and the rest of the regular cast struggle with many more issues beyond cultural assimilation: with the planet of Ilus harboring secrets of its on, new danger will soon find its way to the universe and all the cultures within it.

The fourth season of The Expanse will be available on Amazon Prime Video this December 13, 2019.

More: The Expanse Season 4 Trailer Takes Humanity to the Stars