Advertisement
Commentary
‘Reservation Dogs’ reminded me that I carry my Native community with me
I first heard about the Deer Lady at church. “She’s half-deer, half-woman, and she kills men who hunt in the woods,” said a cool older girl with permed hair smelling of Aqua Net (it was the late 80s). “My uncle saw her, and she had red glowing eyes. But she didn’t kill him.”
As pre-device kids in rural Oklahoma, when we got together — in this case, while our moms were at choir practice — we’d try to scare each other with spooky stories. Of all the campfire tales (Big Foot, Little People, Spook Light, Lovers Leap), the Deer Lady was the lightest on details: always alone, seeking justice, usually just after men. And, of course, the red glowing eyes.
I hadn’t thought much about the Deer Lady until Sterlin Harjo (who is Muscogee and Seminole) introduced her in season one of “Reservation Dogs,” the award-winning FX series that he co-created with Oscar-winning filmmaker Taika Waititi (who is Maori). The dramedy, which concluded beautifully last week after three seasons, centers on four teenagers and their Rez community, telling modern Native stories well, something rarely done in the hundred or so years of television’s history.
No small part of this success lies in who is doing the telling. “Reservation Dogs” is the first mainstream show where every writer, director and series regular performer is Native, as well as much of the crew. It’s also the first scripted network show to film wholly in Oklahoma, in the Muscogee Nation.
While the tale of the Deer Lady is certainly not unique to my Cherokee tribe, but told throughout NDN country, it was still a surprise to see her on screen. As part of a flashback, a young version of the tribal officer, Big, sits alone at a funeral. He’s given advice — “Be good and fight evil” — by the Deer Lady, played by the incredible Kaniehtiio Horn (who is Kahnawake Mohawk). Young Big lives by it, and who wouldn’t after seeing a story told in the dark come to life: a woman with deer hoof feet peeking out from her denim jumpsuit who murders two bad men robbing a gas station — all while young Big is stuck in the bathroom, looking for toilet paper.
If that scenario seems funny — but also terrifying — you’ve found the third rail often struck by this brilliant show. These are stories that perfectly balance heart and entertainment, and when it comes to Native history, laughter makes as much of an impact as tears. “Reservation Dogs” doesn’t spare you either.
While the heart of the show is community, the Deer Lady is a solo operator, clicking her hooves up and down the turnpike (what Okies call the highway) to exact revenge on bad men. With a feathered haircut, big sunglasses and a burnt-orange shearling suede jacket, she is both angel of death and the Egyptian god Osiris, placing a heart on the scale, weighing our evil deeds against the feather of truth and justice. Her presence is violent, but soothing; she embodies a fearlessness with men not always possible for the rest of us, especially in the rural spaces she navigates.
While Deer Lady appears again in season two, in an episode that may be the wildest of the show (no major spoilers, but if you watch, rest assured, you’ll never look at catfish the same way again) — in season three, Harjo brings her out of the campfire mythos and into the light of a fully formed person navigating her own trauma. The Deer Lady, we learn, is a Residential School survivor, an experience many in Native communities know as Indian Boarding Schools, where the “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” policy of stealing Native children from their homes resulted in beating, shaming and torturing them into Christian English indoctrination. Hundreds of thousands of children were sent to these “schools,” a key piece of the genocide playbook funded by the United States government for all Native people on this land.
In the episode, directed by Danis Goulet (Cree and Métis), we are given glimpses of that terrifying experience from the point of view of the children, stripped of names and ties to home by “human wolves.” The residential school flashbacks are mostly in Kiowa, while the nuns’ and guards’ speech is garbled, “like the Charlie Brown teachers but scarier.” Language contains stories, worldviews and beliefs, and it was another piece of identity stolen from children of residential schools. It’s estimated there are only 20 fluent Kiowa speakers today, but the Kiowa actress who plays the young Deer Lady is part of a new generation learning the language.
And while the Deer Lady enacts justice in this episode, she also restores it. She returns Bear (actor D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai who is Oji-Cree), a Rez Dog kid accidentally left behind at a bus station while arguing with his spirit guide, back to his community — to his mom, his uncles, his aunties, his cousins and friends. Bear carries with him the values and traditions the Residential School she escaped from tried to exterminate.
Again and again, we see how community isn’t only good for the soul but needed for survival.
Again and again, we see how community isn’t only good for the soul but needed for survival. The four kids at the center have kindness in their hearts and come to see the opportunities around them, despite living in a place designed for failure. Because they were raised in a community that loves them and supports them — even when, as we see in the show’s opening scene, they steal a truck of Flaming Flamers hot chips.
The final episode opens with another of the young Rez Dogs talking to Hokti (played by Lily Gladstone, who is Blackfeet and Nimíipuu). She’s the mother of a character whose death by suicide, before the series begins, has left the community heartbroken, and despite her heartbreak (or location, Hokti is in prison), she explains to her niece that community must be tended and nurtured: “That’s how community works. What do you think they came for when they tried to get rid of us? Our community. You break that, and you break the individual.”
Those lines struck me hard. When I moved away from Oklahoma for college, then on to Kansas City, D.C. and Providence, I worried I’d severed something in my life. Perhaps that’s why I set my latest book, “Blood Sisters,” back in Oklahoma, writing about the place where I first heard about the Deer Lady, and creating characters who endured trauma and are seeking justice for themselves and their community.
I was reaching for some of what Harjo so masterfully does in “Reservation Dogs,” sharing community through storytelling, as we’ve done in churches and around fires, time immemorial — sharing in laughter as much as tears.
Editor's note: Vanessa Lillie’s novel, “Blood Sisters,” the first in a suspense series featuring a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, will publish on October 31 from Penguin RandomHouse. On November 10th, she will be in conversation with Cherokee author Adrienne Keene at Brookline Booksmith.
