The Open Wounds of Reservation Dogs
This article contains spoilers through season 3 of Reservation Dogs.
At first glance, the scene looks like a well-worn slasher setup: A woman approaches a weathered manor and cautiously crosses the threshold. The frightened look in her eyes signals impending violence, instructing audiences to brace themselves. But in a recent episode of Reservation Dogs, the stellar FX ensemble comedy about a group of Native teens, the typical plotline gets a poignant overhaul. We soon learn that the eerie home, entered by the mysterious Deer Lady (played by Kaniehtiio Horn)—a character based on Native folklore—stands on the same site as the boarding school that she was forced to attend with other Native children.
Over the course of the episode, which was directed by the filmmaker Danis Goulet, the show focuses on the wounds she sustained long before she made it to that creaky porch. Shot in the style of a 1970s art-horror film, these boarding-school scenes paint a terrifying picture of childhood torment. In a prisonlike atmosphere controlled by nuns speaking a garbled language, the young Deer Lady witnesses the shadowy figures commit a slew of escalating abuses: forcibly cutting a Native child’s hair, hitting the students who speak their own language, dragging them out of their beds at night and into a room with a man known cryptically as “Mr. Minor.”
Written by the Reservation Dogs co-creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi along with Chad Charlie, who has also acted on the series, this episode, titled “Deer Lady,” is bold and visually arresting, mostly departing from the show’s usual indie-film aesthetics. By framing one character’s story in such a viscerally unnerving style, Reservation Dogs explores the larger, real-life tragedy of the assimilationist boarding schools that have terrorized Indigenous peoples in North America. It’s part of an inspired decision, in the show’s third and final season, to flesh out the backstories of its sprawling ensemble with genre-melding, multi-episode arcs that subtly illustrate the connections between painful events past and present. The elders of Reservation Dogs learn lessons that also shape the future of the teenage protagonists, making this final installment something of a community coming-of-age story.
Before Deer Lady’s journey to the site of her boarding school, she encounters Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), one of the show’s main characters, at a diner where he’s stranded with no way home. In its first two seasons, Reservation Dogs focused on Bear and the rest of the titular crew, all of whom were reeling from the death of their friend Daniel and plotting to make it out of Okern, the town they live in on their Oklahoma reservation. But now that Bear, Cheese (Lane Factor), Elora (Devery Jacobs), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) have returned from last season’s clandestine California trip to honor Daniel, the Rez Dogs are spending a lot more time being supervised by their elders—and, in the process, learning about the histories that have structured reservation life as they know it.
The show has always made room for the adults to reckon with their own issues, and this season, their increased proximity to the teens has brought those ruptures to the fore. In the episode “Maximus,” Bear is hit with a dart while walking through the desert alone and wakes up blindfolded, tied to a chair in an unfamiliar trailer. Reservation Dogs’ episodes frequently zoom in on one main character at a time, and the ones following Bear have generally tended to highlight how resistant he is to acknowledging uncomfortable emotions—or to admitting that he needs other people. Here, Bear gets a glimpse of what his life might be like if he continues on that trajectory: Maximus (Graham Greene), the embattled man holding Bear captive, reveals that he’s from Okern, too, and his time there is partly to blame for a life of loneliness and repeated institutionalization. When police officers descend upon his trailer at the end of the episode, his surrender is unsurprising but wrenching to watch.
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Using narrative to explore the afterlives of grief is common on television, but part of what makes Reservation Dogs so remarkable is how deftly the series incorporates the stories of elders such as Maximus into the arc of its main characters’ development. By interacting with older generations, the Rez Dogs have grown as young people, as friends, and as members of a community in which many adults haven’t meaningfully confronted their own grief. When he finally makes it home to Okern, Bear’s time with Maximus certainly affects how he interacts with his friends and family. But just as Reservation Dogs grants Deer Lady a weighty backstory, the show also treats Maximus as more than a catalyst to Bear’s growth.
There have been a number of first-rate casting choices on the series throughout its run thus far, but Greene is arguably its most profound: The Oneida actor is widely known for playing the stereotypically taciturn Sioux medicine man Kicking Bird alongside Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves. (That performance landed him a Best Supporting Actor nod at the 1991 Academy Awards, making him the second Indigenous man to ever be nominated in that category. To date, no acting Oscars have gone to any Indigenous people.) On Reservation Dogs, Greene’s character doesn’t exist solely to help Bear understand his own loneliness; his pain is palpable, and his experiences are treated with care.
Other episodes this season have returned to Maximus and the decades-old roots of his isolation. Last week’s “House Made of Bongs” was a trippy fever dream firmly situated in the ’70s environment that shaped Maximus, paying close and empathetic attention to how he first began drifting as a teenager. This week’s “Frankfurter Sandwich” is a stunning episode that highlights the show’s trademark humor even as it lays bare some of the guilt felt by the reservation’s elder men, who function like well-meaning uncles for the teenagers. As the men relay Maximus’s story to Cheese, they acknowledge for the first time how heavily they feel the loss of the community member they neglected.
These confessions push Cheese, who’d been withdrawing from the Rez Dogs, to reconnect with his friends. And for viewers, who’ve seen Maximus carted away by police as an adult and shunned by his peers as a teenager, watching his former friends grapple with their role in his institutionalization is a layered experience that underscores how sensitively the series maps its narrative. As Reservation Dogs approaches its conclusion, the show’s willingness to confront all of its characters’ pasts—and, by extension, the country’s—still grants it a creative edge that will be worth revisiting once it’s over.