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.

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: