OK, Boomer: Peggy Noonan needs to hear the rest of the story

I am 62 years old, but even I am tempted to tell Peggy Noonan, “OK, Boomer.”

That is because she recently published a column titled “Teach Children to Love America,” and although she did not use the word “woke” in her complaint about the current state of grade-school education, I suspect her words were shaped by the political sentiment that justice, fairness, and compassion are somehow bad.

Noonan believes that the nation is not teaching its children to love their country. She says they are “instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place.” She offers no details about these different ways or portals, she says, because “we all know it” to be true.

She did not win many debate team contests with that strategy: assuming that everyone agrees with you. If they did, there would be no reason to make your claims.

When Noonan and other people voice similar complaints about how and what young people are taught about U.S. history, I believe they are listening to only half of the lesson. When the state of Florida, for instance, makes books about Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson difficult for young people to access, it seems to be hearing only the parts about oppression or racial prejudice; but those stories are told because Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson prevailed. They encountered an unjust situation, they fought against it, and they won – and America is a better place because of them.

However, Noonan and others do not hear the whole story. She complains in her editorial that children are taught America’s story is “the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice.” The stories children learn do not end there; the stories end with American society being changed, moved, if only a little, toward a wider scope of justice. America’s story is a history people fighting against being pushed around, fighting against being economically exploited by others, and trying to change the behavior of mean or selfish people.

Not long after her column appeared, the iconic baseball player Reggie Jackson attended a game that recognized the Negro Leagues. Speaking on Fox, he remarked on the racism he faced as a Black player in a predominantly White sport in the late 1960s and 1970s. He said, "The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled — fortunately I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody.”

Someone like Noonan may only hear the negative, the description of the nation's recent history of racism. If she did, she is missing the inspiring part of the story: Jackson persevered, and he did so with the help of his manager (white) and fellow players (mostly white). Jackson’s story, like so many stories, is about the hard work of making a nation a better place.

She ends her brief review of the bad stuff by stating another supposed lesson for today’s young people: “And we never meant it about the Declaration.”

Noonan does not state what “we” never meant; she makes her reader assume this. I would venture the guess she is referring to the passage about “all men are created equal.” I assume this because so many people who complain about “wokeness” are really complaining about other Americans fighting for equal rights; those Americans are fighting to have their “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” recognized. The people doing the oppressing – or at least objecting to the extension of rights to others  – treat this request as somehow a denial of their own liberties.

Her mention of the Declaration of Independence reminded me of its famous reference to American Indians; they are described as “merciless Indian savages.” Noonan’s column appeared around the same time as the anniversary of the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. One hundred years ago, the United States finally recognized the citizenship of Native people born within its borders. Until then, being born within the U.S. borders to families that had lived here before those borders existed did not automatically bestow citizenship – despite that being the case for everyone else.

Again, a story of progress. Although some American Indians have differing opinions about the Citizenship Act, from the perspective of the expanding civil rights, this is a story of change that Noonan might overlook. The United States still makes life difficult for American Indian communities, but the transition from “merciless Indian savages” to U.S. citizenship illustrates positive change.

Noonan says her Memorial Day sermon was inspired by her recent reading of an old book: A Manual of Patriotism, for use in the public schools of New York, written by Charles Rufus Skinner and published in 1900.

More pressing than the lessons of social justice, according to Noonan, are anodyne lessons about patriotism, including the legends of Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. I write “legends,” because the stories she wants students to learn are generally accepted as fabrications or embellishments. Regardless of whether Betsy Ross sewed the flag used in the American Revolution or whether Paul Revere’s ride happened as described in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, I doubt anyone will be offended by their stories. Also, I would not be surprised to learn these stories are repeated in today’s classrooms, or at least these stories are available to students in their school libraries. That is, the stories favored by Noonan are not being censored.

I looked at the book Noonan likes. It includes some aspirational words from George Washington (surely Noonan would approve!). In describing elements that are required for the success of the new country he led, he wrote the nation needed:

“The prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the United States which will induce them to forget their local prejudices and politics; to make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity; and, in some instances, to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community” (359).

Those opposed to “wokeness” seem to believe recognizing civil rights of people different from themselves somehow diminishes their own rights. Many of them resent being told they enjoy “white privilege” (a phrase the Heritage Foundation wants banished from all school texts), despite its obvious existence and influence – like Noonan says, “We all know it is true.” Washington’s words, if applied today, would be asking some people to “sacrifice their individual advantages,” such as white privilege, to benefit other people.

Washington has another interesting statement in Skinner’s book, another aspect he believed was essential to the nation’s existence and prosperity:

“A sacred regard to public justice” (359).

A scholar of Washington’s writings can correct me if I am wrong, but I interpret “public justice” to be something like “civil rights.” I assume a public justice is a right available to all members of the nation. That is definitely a worthy cause and something that young students should be taught to honor.

If it is sacred, we should treat it that way. Many sacred lessons, including those in the Bible, the importance of which Noonan professes early in her column, tell stories about an important value being violated and the consequences of that transgression; those lessons often are paired with examples of the value being honored and the benefits that follow. If we tell only the feel-good version of the story, we do not get the full lesson.

For instance, we should not ignore the fact that Washington wrote these compelling words while at the same time owning slaves. In his mind, some people did not deserve the public justice he claimed was sacred.

That does not mean we “cancel” Washington, but it gives us the opportunity to recognize our nation’s growth. We can separate the man from his words; we can see that the ideals he espoused were bigger than his own understanding of them.

A deep irony may be lost on those who oppose “wokeness” in the way Noonan and others do while espousing Christian values and traditions. Many times, they do not want any negative stories about American history to be taught, especially stories about injustices or suffering caused by white people. What would happen if they treated their sacred text in the same way? What if we eliminated from the Bible those stories that made humans look bad? What if we eliminated stories of misbehavior and transgression? What if people in church said those stories about human sinfulness made them feel bad about being human? There might not be much left of the Bible.

I grew up attending a Southern Baptist church, and we understood the Old Testament as being the story of God’s chosen people moving in and out of His favor, based on their behavior. I see this as analogous to the United States. Its history is one of forward and backward movement in the nation’s understanding of freedom and responsibility, of extending rights and recognition to an ever-widening circle of humanity. This expansion has been achieved with great difficulty and often with violent backlash. Yet we keep trying.

The Vanishing Indian in "True Detective: Night Country"

The conclusion of the fourth season of True Detective on HBO was a mixed bag, at least from the perspective of whether it enacts decolonial or settler colonial agendas.

Indigenous Justice is Decolonial

On the one hand, the show depicts an Inupiaq population solving its problems rather than relying upon the colonial authorities. It also depicts representatives of that colonial authority (however rogue they may be) acquiescing to those Indigenous solutions.

In this sense, the resolution of True Detective: Night Country can be understood as decolonial, in as much as it deviates from the typical structure of narratives about Indian Country when they are created by the dominant culture in the United States. Despite the disapproval the show has received from some TV viewers and critics, we can at least say it depicts Indigenous Sovereignty in a way that is rarely seen in mainstream productions. In this way, we can think of the series as being decolonial.

A colonial narrative would have suggested Indigenous people are incapable of solving their own problems and they need the colonial (white) authorities for that. This suggests the Indigenous characters are inferior to the colonizers, and it suggests that colonization is good, since the colonizers can solve problems that plague the Indigenous community (even when those problems are created by colonization). A decolonial narrative breaks those rules.

The murder that sets everything in motion -- that of an Inupiaq woman who threatened to reveal the secrets of the mining company that is polluting the local water supply -- is solved by women who knew her. The same women are involved in the deaths of the men who killed her, and their deaths are the inciting event for the series. The Inupiaq community solves its own problems in its way.  

The women let the land decide the fate of the guilty men. They do not kill the men; they send the men naked into the night to see if "she" will take them. No one explains who "she" is. Is it the spirit of the woman they killed? Is the spirit something in the ice that the scientists have uncovered? Is the woman they killed an embodiment of that spirit, a continuation of it? Whoever "she" is, she killed the men. They did not freeze to death, we are told; they died of fear or panic, which explains the "corpsicle" they form -- their bodies frozen in mid-scream, knotted together. Freezing to death, we are told, is like going to sleep, not like being tortured.

When Evangeline Navarro (Kail Reis), an Inupiaq state trooper, and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), the white police chief, accept this explanation and help cover it up, they are accepting Inupiaq justice for a crime against an Inupiaq woman and against the land. That is decolonial. 

The Vanishing Indian is Settler Colonialism

On the other hand, the show's finale enacted a trope that is popular in settler colonial narratives: the Vanishing Indian. Despite finding answers to her motivating questions and conflicts, and despite offering some emotional solace to her fellow detective, Navarro walks toward the white horizon in what I assume is a suicidal death similar to her sister's earlier in the season, a surrender to the freezing environment of the Alaskan landscape. A common trope of settler colonial narratives is the Native character who dies or leaves at the end, some times after bestowing their blessing upon the white protagonist.

For my university classes, I provide a brief description of settler colonialism, which is foundational to much U.S. economic, political, and cultural practice: "Settler colonialism is the figurative and literal erasure of Native people and the erasure of the guilt for having done this."

The Vanishing Indian trope serves the purposes of settler colonialism: the Native person is removed from the land, leaving it available for the colonizer to possess. When the Vanishing Indian leaves voluntarily and, even better, gives their blessing to the white colonizers, settler guilt is alleviated. These stories mythologize and romanticize what were actually violent and contested removals.

Imagining actual co-existence between Indian and white communities, imagining settler society truly acknowledging Native rights to the land, requires upsetting the colonial world too much. Even when the stories were written by white authors sympathetic to American Indians, even in stories intended to persuade white Americans to stop abusing Native people, the authors could not imagine a true co-existence between the two groups. Their narrative logic required the departure of the Indian character. (For example, check out Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, published in 1827. No, really. Check it out. Despite its Vanishing Indian trope, it is a fun novel.)

Navarro vanishes. The final scenes of the episode depict investigators questioning Danvers  about the case we have watched unfold, in much the same way as the first season of True Detective involved the investigation of an investigation. They also are asking her about Navarro -- where did she go?

Navarro's death does not clear the land for possession by the colonizers -- in fact, she helps close the polluting mine before she leaves town by recording the confession of a scientist involved with manipulating pollution evidence. This is decolonial in that it imagines frustrating a primary goal of settler colonialism: extraction of resources from Native land.

However, her disappearance at the end left me unsettled. Among the three police officers we have followed throughout -- Navarro, Danvers, and Danvers's protege, Peter Prior (Finn Bennett)-- two have happy endings; only the Native protagonist is not given that.

The story ends happily for Danvers. In the final episode, she is told by Navarro that her dead stepson is watching over her, which gives her some closure. (The "Night Country" of the series title describes the ice caves where the mine's secrets are found and, the story suggests, the land of the dead. This is a land that Navarro has access to, because, you know, Indians are, like, spiritual.) The concluding montage includes Danvers happily sharing a sandwich with her young adult stepdaughter (also Inupiaq), with whom she has been at war for five episodes. The racial/cultural tensions between them seem to have disappeared. This is suggested by the presence of the stepdaughter’s chin tattoo (a “111”); earlier, Danvers had forced Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) to wash off the temporary tattoo she had applied.

We have watched Prior's marriage fall apart for five episodes because of his devotion to the case and his obedience to Danvers's requests. He even kills his own father, whom he learns is a bad cop working for the mining company and who is threatening to shoot Danvers. Despite all of this, in the final episode, his Inupiaq wife takes him back and he is last seen with his toddler son in bed.

Navarro, however, says goodbye to her close relationships and walks away. In her vacated home, she leaves a toy that had belonged to Danvers's stepson; she apparently had retrieved it after Danvers threw it away. At the home of her Inupiaq boyfriend, Navarro returns his SpongeBob toothbrush, a symbol of their connection and domestic possibilities. The potential for an Indigenous family -- Navarro and Qaavik and perhaps their children -- is not imagined. Why not?

One answer may be Issa Perez, the show’s creator, is operating with some settler colonial logic despite trying to imagine stories outside of that. Indian characters can be doomed to vanish because they bear the burden of symbolizing tragedy or spirituality. Perhaps as Perez gestured toward some grander significance in her story, a transcendence of some sort, she chose Navarro to signify that. Even writers attempting to critique settler colonialism (such as Sedgwick, whom I mentioned earlier) use their Native characters to signify that tragedy. Rarely do white characters sacrifice themselves; the Noble Savage does that. Rarely do the white characters depart the scene, vacating the land so its original occupants can continue their lives.

Some people suggest Navarro is not dead, that she did not kill herself in much the same way her younger sister did. However, if she leaves Ennis to be free of the bad memories there, she would probably do that in a car, not in a light jacket and walking across the snow toward the horizon.

The last image of Navarro is of her standing on the porch of what seems to be a vacation home Danvers is visiting in the spring. However, I think the arrangement of the shot suggests she is present but not actually there. Danvers and Navarro are divided in the shot: we see Danvers through the window and Navarro through the doorway. They do not interact significantly. This is consistent with other scenes wherein characters see the ghost or memory of people. Navarro is in the frame with another person, but she is still isolated, alone.

I don’t know.

I am still trying to understand the conclusion of Navarro’s story. That is why this blog entry is called a “hot take”: I might change my mind.

And my speculation here is not about whether I liked the series. I felt it was unsatisfying but for other reasons – not for the story it told but for the way it told the story. It was six episodes long, whereas the otherTrue Detective seasons had eight. Perhaps it needed two more; I think the characters could have been imagined more richly. The interiority and conflicted motivations of characters could have been made more visible. But those thoughts could be saved for a different post.

(This entry was originally published with the title "A Hot Take on True Detective: Night Country.")

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: