A Love Letter to Reservation Dogs

How one show has defined a generation of Indigenous expression

It is my first week without a new episode of “Reservation Dogs” and I still can’t get over it.

I. Still. Cannot. Get. Over. It.

The show wrapped for the season, and I … we … still cannot get over the ninth episode, “Offerings.”

Every Indigenous person I know has been tweeting, posting on Facebook, Tik Toking, adding to their stories that one scene featuring Willie Jack visiting Hokti, the imprisoned mother of Daniel, Willie’s best friend who committed suicide in the events leading up to season one. Hokti is of those who can talk to the spirits and, as we find out, can assemble some impressive medicine of her own.

We all cried.

I’m crying now, just thinking of the power of that scene. Hokti relents on how to help Willie Jack get the Reservation Dogs situated back to something near what they used to be. She instructs Willie Jack on how to hear them and how to feel them when they come, the spirits of the ancestors. As she breathes, a cadre of Mvskoke ancestors appear behind her as their singing swells with the vocal instructions given by Hokti.

A spirit touches Willie Jack and she cries out and we all cried out with her.

There is this trope of being Indigenous in a modern world that we’re both somehow mystical and yet, a useless anachronism to the Manifest Destiny-style utopia of modern Western civilization. We’re regarded as poverty-stricken, addicted, in need of salvation by white religious saviors looking for justifications and we’re regarded as mystical stewards of this land whose injustices can never be redressed by a guilty intellectual class who fears accountability. But it’s in the in-between of that false dichotomy where we find healing and solutions.

We were never poor when we shared with one another, we were never addicted when we lived in the abundance of just taking what we needed instead of hoarding it in scarcity, we never needed to be saved from sins of a god that were brought here without an invitation. Consequently, when we no longer accept the premise of our oppressors, we are liberated, not saved. And when we internalize our liberation, we can talk about the injustices so that they can be redressed.

Beyond that, Reservation Dogs illustrates that we are more than intergenerational trauma and federal funding initiatives. Elora, Bear, Cheese, and Willie Jack all illustrate our humanity because, despite their desire to leave the reservation over the last two seasons, they are the most authentic and liberated versions of Indigenous people that we have ever seen. They are imperfect, they are dumb, they are figuring it out, they are wise beyond their years, they are loving, they are bereft by loss, and yes, they are a little mystical, too.

What I love about this show is that it is the closest to showing how reservation-based Indigenous people balance the realities of living in adverse circumstances while honoring tradition and spirituality that is older than we can conceive. Also like its people, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

In the episode “Run,” we see Uncles Brownie and Bucky work out a decades-old grudge in front of Cheese and Willie Jack while trying to lift a curse on a creek bed, singing “an old song” that leaves us laughing. And in “Decolonativization,” art imitates life imitates art in this metaverse of Indigenous folks rolling our eyes at how ridiculous we allow ourselves to become if we’re doing a land acknowledgment for the dinosaur oyate and celebrating self-aggrandizing “baby elders.” Indigenous folks know how to laugh at ourselves, but especially at the universe.

Those balances are what is central to this series. The mystical mixes with the mundane, the ridiculousness mixes with the tragic, the past is present and the future takes us home.

Sterlin Harjo, Taika Waititi, Devery Jacobs, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Lane Factor, and Paulina Alexis, along with an all-Native writers room and supporting cast have defined this generation’s expression of Indigenity with artful, witty, and genuine storytelling. In his comments online and on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Harjo said that it doesn’t matter if the show doesn’t get nominated for awards, because the praise from Indian Country is all the praise needed.

One of the lines from the last century used to be, “The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV.”

Harjo and his crew have proven that the only thing more powerful than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV.

Wastelo.