Reservation Dogs - Ryan U.

 Reservation Dogs is a tv series focused on the lives of a group of adolescents living on a reservation. The Native American life portrayed in Reservation Dogs is at often points bleak, contradictory, and soul crushing. The main goal of the focus characters to leave for California before the place kills them as it killed one of their friends serves as their motivation but also serves to set the underlying stakes of Native American issues, which are largely set aside in American politics. While this seriousness is established, the show is largely a comedy. This status for the show is not in contradiction to the seriousness of the topic covered, but instead recognizing and adapting to that fact. That the policies America undertook to remove Native Americans from their lands were brutal and leave America responsible for considerable poverty through the failures of the reservation system is not the sole problem. There is also the compounding issue that America has not yet come to terms with the facts of this situation and fails to promote a common understanding of the topic. The beauty of giving people “permission to laugh with us” as co-creator Sterlin Harjo said is that comedy allows room for tragedy to be engaged with and make real issues more relatable and understood without the same level of effort and humility that a sober analysis would require from the listener. That the Native American experience has not been treated as a component of the American experience is an error, though it is not impossible to overcome.

Picture is from the Axios Article "Native Americans feel overlooked in voting rights push"


Comments

  1. David BernellMarch 1, 2023 at 2:55 PM

    Excellent post. I think that this commentary provides a thoughtful interpretation of the show, highlighting how the show not only portrays adaptation to the main characters' bleak prospects, but how the show itself is an adaptation to the circumstances in which its creators find themselves -- in an America that has never come to terms with its role and responsibility for the injustice it has done.

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  2. AnonymousMarch 2, 2023 at 9:20 PM

    Great post - thanks so much Ryan for this thoughtful engagement!

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