Reservation Dogs is the little show that could and did but, when you think about it, that sums up just about every Indigenous person in this country when finally given a well-earned chance. And while those chances should have happened 500 or so years earlier, I’m just glad I was here to finally live through the beginnings of it.
Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen Oklahoma do everything possible to make the Native a bloodstain on the already red road, from police-murdered teens that the media didn’t care about to electing a governor that’s one step away from his own final solution because of the McGirt ruling. Obviously, someone was denied commodities as a kid.
But, much to the Stitt’s chagrin—or possibly due to it—over the last year we’ve seen the opening of the First Americans Museum, the rise of seminal artists like Samantha Crane and Steven Paul Judd in the public consciousness, and, of course, this bright aura of absolute visibility thanks to this television program, coming from the minds of Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, themselves Indigenous creators.
I’ve said it a million times and, thankfully, I won’t have to say it a million more: we’re still here.
As I look back on the first eight episodes of Reservation Dogs, we’ve seen these characters grow almost immediately, and that’s something that is a rarity in general on television. Instead of creating cardboard characters that are wallowing in their depressive realties or living in a white man’s fantasy of the past, Harjo has made actual people, with things I can actually relate to because, like many of us have, I’ve lived it.