This text accommodates spoilers by way of season 3 of Reservation Canines.
At first look, the scene appears like a well-worn slasher setup: A girl approaches a weathered manor and cautiously crosses the edge. The frightened look in her eyes indicators impending violence, instructing audiences to brace themselves. However in a current episode of Reservation Canines, the stellar FX ensemble comedy a couple of group of Native teenagers, the standard plotline will get a poignant overhaul. We quickly be taught that the eerie house, entered by the mysterious Deer Woman (performed by Kaniehtiio Horn)—a personality based mostly on Native folklore—stands on the identical website because the boarding college that she was compelled to attend with different Native kids.
Over the course of the episode, which was directed by the filmmaker Danis Goulet, the present focuses on the injuries she sustained lengthy earlier than she made it to that creaky porch. Shot within the type of a Nineteen Seventies art-horror movie, these boarding-school scenes paint a terrifying image of childhood torment. In a prisonlike environment managed by nuns talking a garbled language, the younger Deer Woman witnesses the shadowy figures commit a slew of escalating abuses: forcibly reducing a Native little one’s hair, hitting the scholars who communicate their very own language, dragging them out of their beds at night time and right into a room with a person identified cryptically as “Mr. Minor.”
Written by the Reservation Canines co-creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi together with Chad Charlie, who has additionally acted on the sequence, this episode, titled “Deer Woman,” is daring and visually arresting, largely departing from the present’s common indie-film aesthetics. By framing one character’s story in such a viscerally unnerving type, Reservation Canines explores the bigger, real-life tragedy of the assimilationist boarding colleges which have terrorized Indigenous peoples in North America. It’s a part of an impressed choice, within the present’s third and remaining season, to flesh out the backstories of its sprawling ensemble with genre-melding, multi-episode arcs that subtly illustrate the connections between painful occasions previous and current. The elders of Reservation Canines be taught classes that additionally form the way forward for the teenage protagonists, making this remaining installment one thing of a group coming-of-age story.
Earlier than Deer Woman’s journey to the location of her boarding college, she encounters Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), one of many present’s major characters, at a diner the place he’s stranded with no method house. In its first two seasons, Reservation Canines targeted on Bear and the remainder of the titular crew, all of whom have been reeling from the dying of their buddy Daniel and plotting to make it out of Okern, the city they dwell in on their Oklahoma reservation. However now that Bear, Cheese (Lane Issue), Elora (Devery Jacobs), and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) have returned from final season’s clandestine California journey to honor Daniel, the Rez Canines are spending much more time being supervised by their elders—and, within the course of, studying in regards to the histories which have structured reservation life as they understand it.
The present has at all times made room for the adults to reckon with their very own points, and this season, their elevated proximity to the teenagers has introduced these ruptures to the fore. Within the episode “Maximus,” Bear is hit with a dart whereas strolling by way of the desert alone and wakes up blindfolded, tied to a chair in an unfamiliar trailer. Reservation Canines’ episodes incessantly zoom in on one major character at a time, and those following Bear have usually tended to spotlight how resistant he’s to acknowledging uncomfortable feelings—or to admitting that he wants different folks. Right here, Bear will get a glimpse of what his life could 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’s partly guilty for a lifetime of loneliness and repeated institutionalization. When cops descend upon his trailer on the finish of the episode, his give up is unsurprising however wrenching to look at.
Utilizing narrative to discover the afterlives of grief is frequent on tv, however a part of what makes Reservation Canines so outstanding is how deftly the sequence incorporates the tales of elders comparable to Maximus into the arc of its major characters’ improvement. By interacting with older generations, the Rez Canines have grown as younger folks, as pals, and as members of a group through which many adults haven’t meaningfully confronted their very own grief. When he lastly makes it house to Okern, Bear’s time with Maximus actually impacts how he interacts together with his family and friends. However simply as Reservation Canines grants Deer Woman a weighty backstory, the present additionally treats Maximus as greater than a catalyst to Bear’s progress.
There have been numerous first-rate casting decisions on the sequence all through its run to date, however Greene is arguably its most profound: The Oneida actor is broadly identified for taking part in the stereotypically taciturn Sioux drugs man Kicking Chicken alongside Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves. (That efficiency landed him a Greatest Supporting Actor nod on the 1991 Academy Awards, making him the second Indigenous man to ever be nominated in that class. Thus far, no performing Oscars have gone to any Indigenous folks.) On Reservation Canines, Greene’s character doesn’t exist solely to assist Bear perceive his personal loneliness; his ache is palpable, and his experiences are handled with care.
Different episodes this season have returned to Maximus and the decades-old roots of his isolation. Final week’s “Home Fabricated from Bongs” was a trippy fever dream firmly located within the ’70s surroundings that formed Maximus, paying shut and empathetic consideration to how he first started drifting as a teen. This week’s “Frankfurter Sandwich” is a shocking episode that highlights the present’s trademark humor even because it lays naked among the guilt felt by the reservation’s elder males, who perform like well-meaning uncles for the youngsters. As the boys relay Maximus’s story to Cheese, they acknowledge for the primary time how closely they really feel the lack of the group member they uncared for.
These confessions push Cheese, who’d been withdrawing from the Rez Canines, to reconnect together with his pals. And for viewers, who’ve seen Maximus carted away by police as an grownup and shunned by his friends as a teen, watching his former pals grapple with their function in his institutionalization is a layered expertise that underscores how sensitively the sequence maps its narrative. As Reservation Canines approaches its conclusion, the present’s willingness to confront all of its characters’ pasts—and, by extension, the nation’s—nonetheless grants it a artistic edge that might be value revisiting as soon as it’s over.
