Sydney R - Reservation Dogs

This show gives outsiders a glimpse of reservation life and what it means to be a Native American/Indian/Indigenous person in the 21st century.  By watching this show, I realized how wrong my expectations were and how much I do not know about reservation life and the Indigenous culture as a whole.  What I was most familiar with were the references to ancestry and the elders that the main characters interacted with in their town.  As explained by Sterlin Harjo, the William Spirit Knifeman character was an attempt to play into the stereotypes of what non-Native people think they know about Native culture.  It also emphasizes the importance of the ancestors and spiritual magic that are still prominent in Native society while also poking a bit of fun at it.  This character seems to represent the series as a whole in how he is comedic and relatable yet also very integrated into Native culture and tradition.  This is the perfect opportunity for viewers of Reservoir Dogs to "laugh with" the creators of the show and as an extension, Native people.  

My favorite part about this show is the community.  Everyone is connected in some way and they all look out for each other to some extent, even if it's through tough love.  I love Officer Big because even though he has to uphold the law to the best of his ability, he is a member of the Native community first.  The episode with Cheese going on a ride-along with Officer Big was funny to me because I think Officer Big knows that Cheese and his friends do illegal things sometimes but he was still willing to help him out and show him a promising career path.  This episode was also important because Officer Big showed Cheese that it is possible to be on both sides: the White side and the Native side.  The community aspect that is depicted in this show is uplifting because even despite their lack of resources and opportunities they still find ways to escape from that.  Both the show and the article exposed how difficult it is to live on a reservation and how the lack of resources is limiting.  It starts to become apparent that the reason why they have such a strong community bond is because none of them have been able to leave the reservation.  





Comments

  1. Catherine BolzendahlMarch 11, 2023 at 1:48 PM

    I'm struck by your last comment and would love to see you expand on it. I wonder if some of the broader social issues we've been talking about would help contextualize this? Was there anything in the reading that helped contextualize?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

El Norte

Image
El Norte is a film about a brother and sister’s journey from a small Guatemalan village north to the US, where they hope to have a better life. While there they face many of the problems Latin American immigrants face in the US. To migrants, the US provides the opportunity of work and some degree of safety while at the same time the US actively creates barriers for immigrants. This was displayed in the movie by Enrique and Rosa not having official documents which greatly limited their job opportunities and limited where they could live. ICE was also a constant threat to Enrique and Rosa along with the people they worked with, such as Enrique’s coworker who reported him to immigration. Later generation migrants tend to contribute to an idealized version of the US that was portrayed by the villagers’ more positive description of the US. In this idealized version, immigration to the US is an easy process and once in the US wealth is abundant for those who try hard. In reality, living in t...
Read more

Dr. Strangelove- Havlyn Ehrich

Image
  Dr. Strangelove is a very interesting movie. We see a satirical stance of politics addressing the Cold War at the time the movie was made. According to one of the readings posted by The Atlantic, it is noted that audiences laughed at this movie back in 1964 when it was produced. However, things became more serious as time went on and nuclear war terminology soon became the norm in public entertainment. The movie Dr. Strangelove tells the story of an individual who has gone insane and launched a nuclear missile attack on the Soviet Union. The movie highlights the incompetence of the president in the movie as well the other governmental officials. They were all acting in fear that the Soviet Union would send nuclear missiles on them too. Such a case would be considered mutual destruction: each party terminates the other. Though this was meant as a comedy, this idea became very real to the people at the time and still flourish in the lives of Americans today. The US president is a...
Read more

Norma Rae - Natalie Sharp

Image
  As demonstrated in the movie Norma Rae, without a regulated market or government regulation, labor workers are easily abused. The film did a great job of highlighting the difficulties the workers face in the textile industry in a town where that was the only job for almost everyone. The fear of standing up and being fired raised the stakes for many people and created a divide in who was willing to risk it all for better conditions. It was interesting to see that the black workers and most of the women workers were the ones pushing for the union the most. We can see that these groups are already being so oppressed that they might have less fear of getting fired than pushing for a union because they are already extremely taken advantage of. When in reality everyone wins if they can all come together. Another thing we have seen portrayed in the film and other films we have watched so far is the division of identities to separate the levels of oppression so each group feels like the...
Read more