Reservation Dogs: A Stomping, Howling Review by Cliff Taylor
My girlfriend and I finally watched the last episode of Reservation Dogs the other night (she was traveling; I told her I’d wait to watch it until she got back) and it did not disappoint. Someone made it to California (no spoilers?) and Gary Farmer, aka Uncle Brownie, pulled off some heroic Indian medicine shit that felt utterly satisfying in its final scenes. Man, are we lucky or what? We Natives finally get a show that all future Native shows are going to have a helluva time outdoing. Reservation Dogs is going to be a damn fine pair of greasy giant shoulders for future Native creators to stand on. And you can quote me on that: the greasy Native giant is here!
With the interwebs nowadays, we’re constantly being stormed upon by neverending information and updates about things and it can cut so much of it all with a kind of sameness; but I remember seeing news of Sterlin Harjo’s uncompromisingly Native show being in the works at FX and feeling truly excited because FX has a history of quality creator-driven shows and I’ve loved Sterlin’s movies, especially his family documentary This May Be The Last Time. Like a lot of us, I’ve been reading books and loving movies for decades and I’ve been starving for Native stuff/stories/content, especially Native-created stuff with a budget and with a level of craft on par with Big Trouble In Little China or No Country For Old Men. The promise of Reservation Dogs was that it’d be a show that delivered on all these things we’ve all been wanting for, well, practically all of our lives. But it’s not real till it’s real, right? Till it’s playing on your laptop screen. Then, BOOM! Making it through Covid, the show was here!
My girlfriend and I watched that first episode and I had to fight back tears when they were doing that memorial for their blood-brother. I am not unique in the amount of pain I carry from my youth; I am grateful every day that I survived, that I lived to tell the tale. It is healing to feel those tears and honestly, better to cry them. This is one large reason why Representation matters: seeing our stories told by us in a truthful way is absolutely HEALING after centuries of distortion, silence, and actual death because of the heart-carried stories of who we really are. I am also not unique in having a lot of family members who did not survive, who’re homeless, who’re in prison, who left this world too early because of how things are for Indian people in this country. I see myself, I see my family, in the characters in Reservation Dogs. We’re in there. That’s us. When those tears came during that first episode that’s what my spirit was doing: it was pointing at the screen, remembering, saying, “That’s me. That’s us.”
Another one of my favorite episodes was the one about the Shit-Ass Cop’s origins as a believer and protector, about his encounter with Deer Woman. I totally felt like that could’ve been worked into the coolest feature-length Rez Native Superhero movie; Sterlin’s filmmaking experience and chops were expertly displayed in that episode. I got a headful of unforgettable stories my relatives have told me about everything underneath the sun, including supernatural things, and one of the total top-shelf ones is about my buddy’s uncle’s real-life encounter with Deer Woman. This shit is real, haha. We need to redefine the collective culture so that the things we’ve been taught by our elders and learned in ceremony, can really be taken seriously and have their central health-making, guiding place in this shit-storm we’re all currently mucking our way through. We gotta be like Shit-Ass and apply ourselves to helping out and following those higher values no matter how goofy or imperfect we are. I’ve been reading comics since I was 10. We’ve all got an origin story. It’s time to remember that and get our asses in gear. Time to kick some doors down, Shit-Asses! Time to make some art!
Season One of Reservation Dogs gave us so many great characters, great storylines, moments, cameos, and laughs. Natives all around the country got to howl and roar over a show (with ‘Reservation’ in the title!) that got so much right, that expressed and communicated so much of the soul we’re all lugging around and still making a lot of our best moves from. We got a catchy frybread tune that we’ll now probably be hearing here and there for the rest of our lives. We got a perfectly realized Lakota-on-a-horse spirit comedian who’ll surely go down as one of the best Native characters in any contemporary story or medium ever. And we got a bunch of rez kids who, like our own youngsters, we love and are gonna love to the bitter end, no matter what they do, no matter how many seasons they wind up being in our lives. Reservation Dogs is a whole caravan of powered-up relatives coming to visit in our time of need when we were hoping just to get at least maybe one solid car-full. Damn, are we lucky. And you know this is just the beginning; you know it’s all just going to get better from here.
Being Native is crazy. Someday, I believe, our stories and ways of looking at the world will be treasured by the rest of the world as much as they’re treasured by us. Our stories give us the power to live. Our stories are all deep with an almost unbearable love. Our stories are in their very nature and design MEDICINE. Reservation Dogs really shows this and, even with room to grow, that’s what it’s doing more right, more skillfully, than anything, What if in the far-off future educators of all kinds looked back and taught about how gifted Turtle Island’s Indigenous People were at turning their art into history-altering medicine because they never forgot that all storytelling was ultimately a powerful human medicine act? In the last episode Uncle Brownie does something impossible with an ax in the face of an oncoming disaster. Maybe it’s time for all of us to be like Uncle Brownie and do something impossible with the story of our lives, with the story of what’s happening on Mother Earth. Reservation Dogs says it can be done. And you know what? That’s good enough for me.
HOKA!!!
Cliff Taylor is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He is the author of The Memory of Souls, a memoir about the Sundance and his life/walk with the little people. He can be reached through his website @ www.cliffponca.com