Bite the Power: The Gentle Satire of Rutherford Falls

In an otherwise entertaining and insightful essay in The Atlantic about Sterlin Harjo and Reservation Dogs, David Treuer briefly compares the show with Rutherford Falls. He describes the latter as "toothless."

I think he is wrong.

Without getting into the topic of which show is better, I should acknowledge that the shows are very different -- despite sharing so many actors and writers. Reservation Dogs is more like an indie film, whereas Rutherford Falls is more like a mainstream comedy. (Treuer calls it a "feel-good sitcom," which is true.)

This makes sense when you consider the previous projects of their creators and the environments that produce them.

Harjo made several independent films (Barking Water, This May Be the Last Time), and he co-created the series with Taika Waititi, who has been launched from independent films (What We Do in the Shadows) to big studio movies (Thor: Ragnorak).  Rutherford Falls was created by TV comedy veterans: Ed Helms (The Daily Show, The Office), Michael Shur (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place), and Sierra Teller Ornelas (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Happy Endings, Superstore).

Reservation Dogs emanates from FX Productions, which also produces It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Archer. Like those shows, it features irreverent topics and a great deal of cursing. The second season of Reservation Dogs seems to have the ambition of unseating The Sopranos for the most F-bombs per screen minute.

Rutherford Falls airs on Peacock (NBC's streaming service) alongside... surprise!... The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And also Modern Family and Psych. Combined F-bomb score: 0.

I believe Treuer sees "teeth" in Reservation Dogs' realism. It focuses on tough issues, such as the grief the band of young protagonists feel about the suicide of their friend, which fuels their desire to escape their reservation community. The show takes place in a poor neighborhood in the Muskogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma. People hustle, whether selling their own CDs or meat pies outside the IHS clinic.The gang steals what they can to raise money for their escape. Etc. The show alternates between pathos and comedy.

Meanwhile, in Rutherford Falls, set on the land of the fictional Minishonka Nation, we see no poverty. I believe that is part of the show's message and one of its contributions to the popular awareness of Native people: Poverty does not define all of Indian Country. There is little pathos in the show. It concentrates on humor and satire. 

Coincidentally, both shows are in their second season, and both shows this season feature episodes about the death a protagonist's female relative.

In Rutherford Falls, "Aunt Sue" is about the aftermath of the passing of a beloved family member. How to honor Aunt Sue in a memorial service at the tribal casino? (It will require "an insane amount of Buffalo Wild Wings" and "Bonny Rait at full volume.") Who inherits Aunt Sue's land -- the niece who works in the tribal cultural center or the nephew who is like a prodigal son? (The niece does not get the land, but she does get Aunt Sue's motorcycle.)

In Reservation Dogs, "Mabel" is about how the community comes together to help with the passing of a grandmother -- she is on her death bed, and her house is filled with friends, family, and food -- and how her granddaughter deals with the difficult emotion of saying goodbye to the woman who raised her after her mother's death. There is humor, but what I heard about most from the viewers I know were the tears. Good tears, but tears nonetheless. I do not think viewers were intended to cry about "Aunt Sue."

Reservation Dogs does not shy away from representing hardships in its Muskogee Creek community, but it does not devote much energy to the causes of those hardships. There are #LandBack signs and t-shirts sprinkled through episodes, but no one talks about how American Indian reservations are structured to keep Native populations in poverty. (You can read about some of those structures in "5 Ways the Government Keeps Native Americans in Poverty.")

Harjo's show has an indie film feel, whereas Rutherford Falls is more mainstream -- and, perhaps because of that or despite that, it engages with the dominant culture more explicitly, critiquing it (however gently). 

Despite what Treuer writes, we could say Rutherford Falls shows some teeth when it engages with  how museums represent Native people, how Native communities can use some tools of capitalism to fight the system that makes their lives difficult, or how Hollywood misrepresents Native culture and ritual. 

From the first season, one of the Rutherford Falls moments that circulated on social media was a speech from Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes), who is the CEO of the tribe's casino. He tells NPR reporter Josh Carter (Dustin Milligan) that the tribe has always adapted to survive the challenges it has faced, and corporate capitalism is just the latest challenge. He says corporate capitalism is just one model, and tribal capitalism can operate to benefit the whole community rather than just a few shareholders. He concludes the speech by saying, "I won't rest until my nation gets every single thing that was taken from them."  

You can watch the scene here.

Debbie Reese studies Native representations in children's literature and other media; she advises librarians and educators on how to select appropriate and accurate representations, and she recently tweeted to recommend content creators pay attention to Rutherford Falls.

She is referring to an episode about Rutherford Falls characters who become cultural advisors to Adirondack, a fictional drama that seems to spoof Yellowstone and Hollywood representations in general. The episode, "Adirondack S3," opens with a scene from that show, which, ironically, is popular in the Minishonka community of Rutherford Falls. In it, the white protagonist is helping defend the Native community from losing its land to a greedy corporation. As he speaks the line -- "Can't you see, after all we have done to erase these people, they are noble keepers of the land?" -- he steps in front of Chief Night Pipe, making him disappear.

Even those who think they are helping can be part of the problem.

The cultural advisors to Adirondack discover that the show's creators want Native imagery, but not true representation. Behind the scenes of the show within the show, the advisors discover the producers are making up "Indian culture" as they wish. In this, they echo a concept from Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor. In his book Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, he writes that representations of Native people from the dominant culture (museums, popular fiction, movies, advertising) are a "cultural concoction of bourgeois nostalgia." For Vizenor, these representations may look like Natives, but, in an irony lost on their creators, they signal the absence of any real Native rather than their  presence. 

The cultural advisors from the Minishonka Nation learn that the show's producers do not want accurate Native representation in their show, so they give the producers every cliche, exaggeration, and invention they can. Their goal is to make fools of the producers, who do not realize they are being tricked. 

Rutherford Falls may not bear fangs -- it is too gentle for that -- but it does have some bite.

 

Welcome Home, Irene: A Reservation Dogs Multiverse?

DC and Marvel have their universes. Some characters have their own multiple timelines, as they live out different destinies simultaneously. 

Perhaps Sterlin Harjo has one too.

He is the co-creator of Reservation Dogs, which tells the story of four young Muskogee Creek friends as they cope with the obstacles of growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma -- and as they overcome the grief of their friend's suicide. 

I thought of how some of Harjo's works might fit together -- ala DC and Marvel -- when I saw the second episode of the first season, "NDN Clinic." For me, the episode connected to two earlier Harjo films, the short Goodnight, Irene (2005) and the indie feature Barking Water (2009).

The three involve Indian Health Services, and they either complete a narrative arc for Irene or perhaps suggest parallel lives for her.

Casey Camp-Horinek plays Irene in two films, and she is listed as "Grandma" in the Reservation Dogs episode, but I like to think she is Irene there too. In that episode, she calls from her hospital room to Cheese (Lane Factor) as he walks by her door. She calls him "Grandson" and convinces him to take her out of the hospital. 

Goodnight, Irene suggests this is the hospital where she dies. The short film's final shot is of Irene walking alone down a long hallway.

Perhaps in one timeline she does die there. Perhaps in another timeline, she is rescued by Cheese.

In the short film, Camp-Horinek plays an older woman who has come to the clinic for her last visit. What she suffers from is not named, but the film suggests she will not be going home. She spends the day with two men in the waiting room. They are not named -- IMDB indicates them as "Young Man" (Robert A. Guthrie) and "Middle-age Man" (Jon Proudstar). She tells them she was married to Pete Harjo, who was apparently a popular barber before he passed away. 

In Barking Water, the tables are turned, and she rescues Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman) so he will not die in the same clinic. They were a couple, and despite Frankie's bad behavior then, Irene helps him escape to say goodbye to his daughter and granddaughter. 

(Whitman also appears in Reservation Dogs, playing Old Man Fixico. He is not seen with Grandma.)

Although Goodnight, Irene was released before Barking Water, in my reconstruction, its events take place before. Perhaps Irene had an unhappy relationship with Frankie after Pete Harjo died, and then she rescues him from the IHS clinic before going there herself. (Or perhaps this is an alternate timeline in which she never meets Pete.)

Then in "NDN Clinic" she receives the reward she earned by helping Frankie when Cheese rescues her (and becomes her adopted grandson). The episode ends with Cheese and Grandma sitting outside the clinic, enjoying the outdoors, so it does not explicitly depict an escape, but in the final episode of the first season, "Satvrday," he visits Grandma in her home -- she clearly made it out alive.

There are even some call backs or Easter Eggs in "NDN Clinic" that suggest a connection to Goodnight, Irene. (According to IMDB, that is Harjo's first credit as a film director and he also wrote the script.) You can watch it on YouTube here. For instance, when "Middle-Aged Man" checks in at the front desk, he bleeds on the admission form. (The actor also signs his real name, Jon Proudstar.)

When Bear (D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) checks in at possibly the same desk in "NDN Clinic," he also bleeds on the form.

Three drops each time. Coincidence? I will let you decide.

Perhaps the biggest Easter Egg is that Middle-age Man tells Irene he has a three-year-old daughter. The same actor plays Leon in Reservation Dogs. He is the father of Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis). Does the little girl mentioned in Goodnight Irene grow up to be the inimitable, laconic, big-hearted Willie Jack?

I think so. At least she does in my SHU.

Addendum (09/08/2022): Theory Confirmed. In the seventh episode of the second season, "Stay Gold, Cheesy Boy," Cheese is lying in a foster care bunk bed and looking at his notebook. For a brief moment, we see this page:

 

 

Translating Rutherford Falls

Twitter can be a scary pool to dip your toes into.

If you comment about a popular topic, use a trending hashtag, or tag someone famous, your tweet can get attention you may not have wanted. 

For instance, earlier this year I made a snarky comment about the array of bad haircuts Jon Bernthal has sported in his various film and TV roles. I did not tag him, but he saw and liked the tweet. Soon that tweet had more than 15,000 impressions. (I commented on the tweet to make it clear I thought he was a fine actor.)  

No one attacked me (or my own haircuts), but the number of impressions made me nervous. I was uncomfortable getting that much attention, especially for a comment that might be considered mean.

Even when there is no risk of generating bad karma, a bunch of impressions can scare me. In August 2021, when The Chair was popular on Netflix, I tweeted a pitch for a show about adjunct faculty members. It received more than 46,000 impressions and more than 400 likes.

 

These thoughts came to mind recently after I saw an episode of Rutherford Falls from its second season on Peacock (NBC's streaming service). In the season's second episode, Feather Day (Kaniehtiio Horn) walks into the office of tribal casino executive Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes) and speaks in Mohawk. Her comment is not translated on the screen, and the closed captioning states "speaking Mohawk." She and Terry then have a discussion in English, and she exits the meeting with another untranslated Mohawk comment.

 

This prompted me to ask on Twitter about the lack of translation.

 Not long after that, showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas replied.

This is where the "fog of Twitter" comes in. Ornelas does not know me. We were not having a conversation about this episode. She had little context in which to "hear" my tweet. Was she hearing a complaint? Was she hearing snark? Her reply seemed a little defensive to me, calling back to a 50-year-old film to explain the lack of translation. Perhaps defensive is not the right word. Resentful? Irritated? I do not know her. This was not part of a conversation we were having. I had little context in which to "hear" her reply.

Perhaps she had second thoughts about her response, because a few moments later she added another reply:

As the "likes" for her response surpassed the "likes" on my original post, I wondered if I was getting dunked on. Did the people who liked her response think I was a dunderhead? 

As I say, she does not know me. She does not know that I teach American Indian literature and American Indian Studies. She does not know that I talk about Rutherford Falls in class as an example of Native self-representation, as an example of visual sovereignty.

My Twitter profile mentions my teaching and my citizenship in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, so perhaps Ornelas checked that out and decided my question was legit. 

I understand the impulse to not translate the Mohawk language. This decision might be related to a concept I discuss with my students: ethnographic refusal.   

This describes the refusal of a Native person to explain their experiences, beliefs or cultural practice to an outsider, such as an anthropologist. This refusal makes sense in light of how knowledge of Native people has been misused and misinterpreted by the dominant cultures of the United States and Canada. Audra Simpson discusses this concept in her book titled Mohawk Interruptus. 

I have heard the term also applied to creative decisions by writers, artists, and filmmakers. They have a story to tell, and they know non-Native people will be in their audience, but they refuse to have characters or narrators explain everything for them. Since so many members of nearly any audience are non-Native, great pressure can be applied to Native creators to explain everything. Native creators may resist that pressure because having a character explain the significance of a symbol, statement, ritual, or belief does not feel right aesthetically. They also might resist because explaining would reveal to outsiders some important cultural element that a Native community would prefer be concealed.

When discussing this element in my classes, I talk about the "anthropological curiosity" or "anthropological voyeurism" that some non-Native audience members bring to a book or movie. Some people in the audience are more invested in learning the cultural secrets of American Indian communities than how the central conflict is resolved or whether the characters are well drawn. This kind of curiosity can be tiresome for the Native creator who is most interested in telling a good story.

From what Feather and Terry say in English just after she enters, I assume her Mohawk statement was some kind of dig at his fancy office. That does not seem like sensitive cultural information or insider knowledge. Other things in the show are not explained, such as the inside joke of characters saying "Skoden" and "Stoodis." These words are rez-speak for "Let's go then" and "Let's do this" -- especially as challenges to a fight. These are titles for two episodes of the first season, and characters say these things to each other, but no one explains what the words mean. If you know, you know. 

However, the decision to not translate Feather's Mohawk dialog because "It's not there to be explained" seems odd for a show like Rutherford Falls, because it spends a lot of time explaining things to its audience. In fact, I think one way the show is valuable to the general audience is how much it explains. One of its central characters, Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms), seems to be a stand-in for the non-Native audience members. His function is to learn from his Native friends and alter his behavior and beliefs according to what he learns. 

An example of  the show explaining things for the benefit of its audience occurs in the second-season episode titled  "Land Back," when Nelson (Dallas Goldtooth) tells Reagan Wells (Jana Schmeiding) that the artifacts in the tribe's museum collection want to be handled and visited with rather than be stored away or handled only with gloves. He tells her, "They've been kept away for far too long. Each of these items has an energy. They want to breathe. They want to be held. This doll wants us to visit with them." During his remarks, she looks at him skeptically, but this is a concept Reagan should be familiar with. She has a master's degree in Museum Studies, and she is dedicated to decolonizing the curation and presentation of her tribal heritage. She would know what he is doing when she sees him talking to the items in the collection. However, many people in the audience probably are not familiar with that idea. He explains it to her for their benefit.

Part of the cultural work performed by Rutherford Falls is explaining contemporary Native life to a non-Native audience. When I use the phrase "cultural work," I am thinking of Jane Tompkins' book Sensational Designs, in which she discusses the ways literature can "redefine the social order." Television shows can be very effective at doing this, changing the way audiences think about people different from themselves. In this case, redefining how non-Native people think of American Indians. Shows like Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs, by placing so much of their production in the hands of Native directors, producers, writers, and actors, can alter the stereotypical impressions so many Americans have of Native people.

Too many Americans think of Native people as living in the past. They identify American Indians with signs of the 18th century, with tipis and headdresses, etc. Even when they know that Native people live contemporary lives, the role they expect for Native people in popular culture is the Noble Warrior or the Bloodthirsty Savage, etc.  These two shows do the important work of representing Native people living thoroughly contemporary lives. 

I thought not translating Feather's Mohawk comments was interesting because Hollywood has often treated Native languages as interchangeable or, worse, not worth translating. A famous example is John Ford's The Searchers. The American Indian characters in that film are supposed to be Comanches, but many of the actors were Navajo. They spoke their language, but the film pretended it was Comanche they were speaking. The non-Native audience would not know the difference, and it did not matter what the actors actually said, since the captions would state whatever Ford wanted them to. 

 

Such events are depicted in Reel Injun, a documentary about Hollywood's representations of Native people. That film presents a clip from a Hollywood Western, A Distant Trumpet (1964), with accurate captions instead of the originals. The Native actors are insulting the white characters, calling them snakes who crawl through their own shit, but this is not what the film's captions state. The film crew had no idea what the Native actors were saying. They probably did not care. You can watch the scene here.

The worst example is when a film states simply [speaking in foreign language]. Languages are not foreign to everyone. They are not foreign to their speakers. Refusing to translate the dialog seems dismissive. "What these characters are saying does not matter."

I think all languages should be translated and captioned for film and television. Characters make statements for reasons, and their dialog communicates motivations and intentions -- even if no other characters on the screen can understand what is said.

Hollywood has a history of dismissing Native languages, and so I like to see them translated on the screen. I think translating and captioning Native languages acknowledges them as carriers of meaning, treats them as equal to other languages. I know Rutherford Falls means no disrespect to the Mohawk language by not translating it; this is just my personal preference. 

Finally, one contribution to the Twitter conversation made an excellent point about captioning and translating Native languages. If someone is a Mohawk language speaker but is also hearing impaired, they would appreciate the captioning service, even if the dialog is untranslated. Excellent point!