Gangsters, Poems, and Reservation Dogs

Recently, I saw a tweet from the author of a book about the history of residential schools for American Indian children. She said she had been contacted by the producers of Reservation Dogs, and they wanted to use some information from her book to inform an episode they were working on.

 

This tweet reminded me of when I first saw the pilot for Reservation Dogs and I wondered if they had consulted a different book, Sy Hoahwah's Velroy and the Madischie Mafia. In fact, I wondered if the writer of that book was involved with the show.

Superficially, figures from the book's cover and promotional pictures of the show's protagonists resemble characters from Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs poster.

 

This is the original 2009 cover of Hoahwah's book of interconnected poems. When I reviewed the book for Studies in American Indian Literatures, I called attention to the similarity between the images that echoed Tarantino's film poster, but depicted in the colors of the Comanche flag. The juxtaposition of the modern outlaws with the black-and-white photograph of aging Comanche men (perhaps warriors) suggested "themes of violence, resistance, and cultural synthesis."  I noted that "Four of the five figures have what appear to be bullet holes where their heads should be." The bottom image "problematizes the effectiveness of this warrior mentality—the image suggests death as much as resistance."

Less gruesomely, the pilot of Reservation Dogs suggested similar themes, and both are set in Oklahoma. Velroy and the Madischie Mafia takes place in a Comanche community of Southwestern Oklahoma, and Reservation Dogs is set in a Muskogee Creek community of Southeastern Oklahoma. 

I thought of Hoahwah's book while watching the pilot episode, "F*ckin' Rez Dogs." In it, the character Bear has a conversation with the spirit of William Knifeman, a warrior who died at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The spirit says his task is to find "lost souls" like Bear. He tells the young man, "Being a warrior is not always easy. You and your thuggy-ass friends -- what are you doing for your people? It's easy to be bad, but it is hard to be a warrior with dignity."

The first poem of Velroy introduces us to the members of the gang as they party in a dance club. It describes their bodies "as sunrise songs in reverse." 

In a coming-of-age ceremony for young women in some Native communities in the Southweast, "sunrise songs" help a young woman transition from her childhood to adulthood. She is transformed, with the help of friends and family, from a child without responsibilities to an adult member of the community. 

Hoahwah's first poem sets the tone for those that follow. A sunrise song in reverse would be an abdication of responsibility. Although the poems tell stories of lost innocence, they also tell stories of a refusal to grow up in a way that William Knifeman is encouraging Bear to do. 

As the spirit warrior suggests to Bear, his friends are not real gang members. He dismisses them as "thuggy-ass" rather than actual thugs. The violence in the pilot is limited to a paint-ball drive-by from a rival gang, and in the second episode Bear get pummeled in an alley by the same enemies, but he survives with no lasting injuries.

Meanwhile, Hoahwah's characters live with and enact real violence. The narrator ends the first poem this way:

I killed a Lakota man,

he was a Rollin' 20.

It was with a shotgun.

It was powwow season.

I fancy danced.

Later poems describe other battles, including a shootout at Walmart and the narrator's eventual confession that he killed Velroy, the gang's leader.

Reservation Dogs also resonated with Velroy and the Madischie Mafia for me when the teenagers ask a "tradish" uncle to put a curse on the leader of their rival gang (in the wonderful "Uncle Brownie" episode). Velroy's gang also uses (or misuses) traditional medicine powers to harm their enemies or protect themselves. 

For example, in the poem "White Clay," gang member Stoney is awarded bullet-dodging power after an encounter with a skeleton/ghost at a "haunted spot" in the woods. With that power, he is able to win a battle with a Mexican gang. 

Eventually, Velroy's gang falls apart, and the narrator ends the book alone, waiting for the return of Comanche power on the Southern Plains. In an essay for the journal of the Western Literature Association, I suggest that Hoahwah's message is this Comanche resurgence will not come from the gangster-as-warrior mentality the narrator and his colleagues enact. The bullet-holes-for-heads on the cover suggest that route is a dead-end. 

I think Reservation Dogs agrees with that perspective. The show's gang initially plans to use the proceeds of their various crimes to finance a move to Los Angeles, escaping their community, for which they blame the suicide of their friend. However, the narrative arc for the characters traces their personal and emotional growth away from that desire for escape, answering a question William Knifeman asks of Bear in the first episode: "What are you fighting for?"

Bear gets a job and helps his single mother with the bills. Cheese rescues an older woman from Indian
Health Services, and she becomes his adopted grandmother. Willie Jack decides her proper place is with her family (and her ancestors). Elora Danan holds on to the dream of escape the longest, but she begins to change after she assumes responsibilities, such as hosting the gathering of family and friends for her grandmother's final moments and inheriting the house. The gang travels to California at the end of the second season, but they do so to honor the memory of their dead friend, to fulfill the promise they had made to him to go there.

These arcs were represented by memes that I have seen on the show's Facebook page, such as this one for Willie Jack.

Velroy's gang members dance to sunrise songs in reverse, but the Rez Dogs dance to them in the right direction.

Although I do not believe Hoahwah was consulted in the creation of the TV series, I think inviting him to help write a Halloween episode would be nice. (They did have a spooky episode about Deer Woman in the first season.) In Velroy and his most recent collection, Ancestral Demon of Grieving Bride (2021), Hoahwah demonstrates an affection for the gruesome and the supernatural, which I have described elsewhere as "Comanche Gothic."

An example: owls.

In the "Uncle Brownie" episode, the kids go to Brownie's house and he has a plastic owl standing guard on his front porch. Elora Danan, Bear, Willie Jack, and Cheese all see it and immediately cover their eyes, knowing they should not look an owl (even a fake one) in the eyes. Bad medicine. The producers save the viewing audience from tempting fate by pixelating the owl's eyes. This move was much-remarked on by Native Twitter and perhaps puzzled non-Native viewers.

Meanwhile, in Velroy, the poems do not look away. "Spotted Owl" describes using owls "to converse with the dead," who then come visit. "Relatives and friends arrived,/ oozed their way up the driveway, and into the homes/ leaving a trail of rot and bile." The risen-dead crowd into the bathroom, where they look at their ruined selves in the mirror, "sobbing, giggling." In "Battle of Dirty Shame, OK," Velroy raises the dead himself by combining traditional and contemporary cultures: "With owl feathers, black handkerchief, and some Velvet/ Underground he summoned the Bradshaw kid/ who died six months before."

Whereas Reservation Dogs does a good job of depicting the everyday world of rural Oklahoma (a neighbor has a horse grazing in the front yard, fried catfish is popular, many residential streets do not have curbs), Velroy's regional color is a landscape filled with ghost stories, such as the headless farmer who haunts a county road, running alongside cars and tapping on their windows or jumping into the beds of pickup trucks. 

If you have not seen Reservation Dogs, I encourage you to check it out.

If you have not read Hoahwah's poetry, I encourage you to check it out.

P.S. -- This is the new cover of Velroy and the Madischie Mafia:

You can order it from Bookshop.org here. You can order Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Widow from Bookshop.org as well (link).

Works Cited

Andrews, Scott. Review of Velroy and the Madischie Mafia by Sy Hoahwah in Studies in American Indian Literatures Vol. 24 No. 1 2012: pp 64-67.

---. "The Significance of the Frontier in Comanche Poetry." Western American Literature Vol 49 No. 1 (2014): pp. 9-28.

"F*ckin' Rez Dogs." Reservation Dogs, created by Sterling Harjo and Taika Waititi, season 1, episode 1, FX Productions, 2021.

Hoahwah, Sy. Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride. U of New Mexico P. 2021.

---. Velroy and the Medischie Mafia. U of New Mexico P. 2021. Originally published in 2009 by West End Press. 

"Uncle Brownie." Reservation Dogs, created by Sterling Harjo and Taika Waititi, season 1, episode 3, FX Productions, 2021.