Reservation Dogs — A Review

In Indigenous director Sterlin Harjo’s new work Reservation Dogs, a distressed young girl runs through run-down school buildings. She storms inside an abandoned storage shed, and breaks down in front of her friend as she finds him suspended by a rope from the ceiling. Elora Danan (played by Devery Jacobs) desperately pulls her friend back and forth, but all signs of life have left his body. She collapses knee-first onto the ground crying, unable to comprehend the reality that the boy she had always loved had forever left her on that humid afternoon.

Set in an Indigenous reservation in rural Oklahoma, the show follows four Indigenous youths — Elora Danan, Bear, Willie Jack, and Cheese — as they save money for California. Along the way, the group finds themselves in a hostile confrontation against another band of teens, torn between whether or not they want to leave everything behind, and trapped by the trauma from losing their loved ones. Despite all this, Reservation Dogs never flinches from these hardships, and never lets them become its characters’ identities. It makes a silent argument: reconciliation is not about pity, but rather about seeing Indigenous lives honestly — their hardships, personalities, and individualities together, instead of one erasing the other.

The layouts in season 1 are not just well-shot pictures. They symbolize the intrinsic disadvantages Indigenous communities face in North America: as Elora Danan, Bear, Willie Jack and Cheese walk into the junkyard, attempting to broker a good deal for the truck they had just stolen, the audience is presented with several people clearly high on drugs mindlessly strolling the area. A seemingly ordinary event for the teens, with an unsettling sheen, heightens the show’s examination of kids inundated with the lack of opportunities and flaky adults. Similarly, when the teens visit their local health clinic, they are confronted with impatience, disregard, and uncustomarily long wait times. Despite being a mostly lighthearted episode, episode 2 is the tragic embodiment of what it looks like when an entire generation is left to navigate a broken system on their own. Harjo captures this theme with balance and intention. Harjo depicts the drug users in the junkyard, and the clinic’s long wait times, as ordinary, unremarkable background — no dramatic music, no lingering camera. This lack of sensationalism further illustrates the damning nature of the youths’ conditions; problems many regard as insurmountable are the reality youths on the reservation face every single day. Harjo’s refusal to sensationalize the youths’ disadvantages makes a deliberate claim: Indigenous struggles should be viewed honestly, instead of being seen as a tragedy.

“You ever feel like you’re just stuck?” Elora Danan’s question captures the gravity of life on the reservation; hardships are not incidental, but rather prolonged, ordinarily present. Yet despite all this, Reservation Dogs refuses to let hardships define the characters. The youths have their community, loved ones, humour, and futures to fight for. Beyond its depiction of the traditional growing-pains of young adulthood, the first season of Reservation Dogs depicts many harrowing and distressing moments — the death of a close friend by suicide, a familial tug-of-war featuring an irresponsible “rapper” father, gang violence. Yet for each heartwrenching moment, the show counterbalances it with warmth — Elora Danan’s tearful confession to her driving instructor/ex-basketball coach, Willie Jack and her father’s emotional reminiscence of Daniel, an unexpected gathering in a basement during a tornado. Reservation Dogs provides hope for the youths’ futures. Its ensemble’s turbulent experiences in season one are formative to their development. Bear gained a sense of responsibility towards his community, Willie Jack gained a deeper appreciation for his family, while Elora Danan learned the importance of picking the right partners-in-crime in pursuit of life-changing goals. The four youths were hurt, they grieved, and they cried, but they refused to let their circumstances define them. This mix of tone — humour and warmth intertwined with grief — mirrors the way Indigenous people actually live: with individuality and personality instead of as a uniform group defined by their shared disadvantages.

For all its darkness, Reservation Dogs never lets its characters or audiences fall into despair. In the season finale, we see the teens part their ways in pursuit of what they want in life — Elora Danan driving off to California, Bear getting dinner with his mother. Instead of wielding suffering as a spectacle, Harjo wields it as context. The kids are still broke, and they are still grieving. But they are still there, and still fighting. And in Harjo’s telling, that is enough. Reservation Dogs is a must watch for Canadian youths grappling with reconciliation, as it teaches them that reconciliation begins not with pity, but with seeing Indigenous lives honestly, and not letting their circumstances erase their personhood.