The Life Lesson Of Reservation Dogs

Reservation Dogs Sets An Impossibly High Bar For Coming-Of-Age Comedies

In the third and final season of the show, the four underdogs at the heart of the tale come to realisations about what it means to heal and grow. Joshua Muyiwa reviews.

OVER its past two seasons, FX/Hulu’s Reservation Dogs, streaming on Disney+ Hotstar and co-created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, has been a wonderfully sharp coming-of-age comedy. At its heart are four Native American teens – Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor) – coming to terms with the loss of their friend Daniel (Dalton Cramer), who died by suicide. And in this third and final season, they realise the healing isn’t in running away from their indigenous lands in Oklahoma. Rather, the quartet (and us?) learn that to grow with the pain, they need to tap into the collective wisdom of their elders and the community around them.

In the first episode of this season, we find the four of them waiting in a parking lot of a fast-food joint with White Jesus (Incubus’ lead vocalist Brandon Boyd) — an eccentric unhoused man they have befriended. They’ve just gotten back from wading into the ocean, ritualistically realising a dream that Daniel never got to. But now, they’re being taken back home by Elora’s aunt Teenie (Tamara Podemski). They aren’t running away but returning – a sea change in their motivations. Three of them make it on the bus back with the aunt but Bear gets left behind. He has another path to take, his unhelpful warrior spirit guide William Knifeman (Daniel Goldtooth) tells him.

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AT JOURNEY'S END

In Reservation Dogs, A Solution For Modern Mental Health Crisis & Loneliness

By Joshua Muyiwa

There’s always unpredictability packed into the storylines charted out by these characters. And it is always these offbeat tracks taken that make arriving at their final destination that much sweeter. Bear literally walks through a desert and ends up being rescued by Maximus (Graham Greene), a wonderfully weird man who lives in a tin-foiled trailer, drinks well-water and grows eggplants as gifts for the “star people”. But Bear’s able to allow him this world, engage with it, and even draws parallels in their experiences of there always being a slip between their intentions and actions. Meanwhile, Elora considers going back to school to study “psychology or something” and the need for a signature on her documents forces her to track down her father Rick Miller (Ethan Hawke). This brief encounter brims with the promise of her having the feeling of family even outside of the Indigenous lands.

The other two — Willie Jack and Cheese — have always found comfort in their community, and on going back home, they slip into the available cracks. Willie Jack spends time with the reservation’s medicine man, Fixico (Richard Ray Whitman), and learns that “real medicine” isn’t just medicine. It is accompanied by gestures, goodwill and grace too. Cheese gets glasses, and the ability to nudge feelings out of the emotionally-blocked elders around him. The opening of these dams allowed for the younger and the older generation to understand each other’s position in the present.

In this final season of Reservation Dogs, the underlying theme of “there are no separate people. Only entities that rely on each other” is brought front and centre. And as Maximus, the alien-believing hermit in the desert softly says to Bear, “People are only concerned with things they can see and hear. But there are other layers of life that can’t be seen or spoken of. These need just as much attention and just as much care.” And in this beautiful, tender season, the showrunners pay the closest attention to these kinds of moments. They let the silences between their characters linger, loose, leaving us – the audience to find ourselves, one amongst them too.

Reservation Dogs doesn’t moralise but it does hint at solutions to our contemporary crisis of mental health and deep loneliness. As Willie Jack says to Elora on a stolen school bus to break out an elder from a mental health facility, “That’s why I think it’s good to keep our elders around. We’re always learning stuff from them, no matter what, even if we’re just sitting there.” For a whole lot of us, the past is a heavy burden; understanding the ways people before us lightened this load might inform our own tactics of rest, relaxation and recovery. Reservation Dogs isn’t blunt; it meanders, mucks around and mines for meaning in the smallest act, hoping to remind us that everything is in the small details.

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