It’s the third—and, sadly, final—season of Reservation Dogs, the critically lauded series by Sterlin Harjo that shows it’s truly a good day to be Indigenous!
With a good sound-system bumping in their car, the proto-Rez Dogs are in their infancy, with younger versions of Brownie, Bucky, Fixico, and others, creating mischief on the last day of their boarding school. While they have windowpane drug-trips at a local beer bash in the woods, for Maximus, it becomes real when he is visited by aliens. Probably.
Skoden? Stoodis!
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Episode 6: “Frankfurter Sandwich”
The Plot: After some virtual reality shenanigans, Cheese is taken fishing with his elders—Brownie, Bucky, and Big—in an effort to get him out of his doldrums and depression. During the trip, they talk about the past, the future, and the thread that binds us all to it.
During a makeshift counseling session, more information on Maximus is remembered and confronted, a family of bigfoots take a piss, and, more importantly, Cheese realizes that his friends and family are always there for him, regardless of what changes he goes through.
The Review: In the mid-to-late eighties, on my Indigenous father’s land, we had a pond. It was small and idyllic, but packed with so many catfish we could have started our own Catfish Cabin franchise. Almost every day, we would fish in the body of water, usually for one or two hours.
My dad taught me everything I know about casting a rod, reeling them in, and frying our bounty…but, sadly, we never talked about anything personal. I knew he had enough skeletons in the closet, but he never talked about his past and very little about the present.
By the nineties, we moved to Oklahoma City and, eventually, he died with multiple strokes to his name but I understand more now, because I had to learn about generational trauma and how it affects us—I guess it only took twenty years to identify it, but I wonder if he would have dealt with it?
As Cheese uses his “truth-stick” to learn about Brownie, Bucky, and (especially) Big, and their years of trauma due of discrimination, poverty, and “the system,” as Brownie calls it, it lets them know—and us, the Rez Dogs audience—that it’s a real thing that has infected every Indigenous person around.
I hope that changes, but from your racist neighbor to Kevin Stitt on up, I don’t think it will.
Best Line: “Zombie diddler.” - Cheese
Funniest Moment: Using the Muskogee method of fishing using “drunk root,” Bucky catches the most fish, negating having to eat the titular sandwich.
Oklahoma Soundtrack Pick: Jacob Tovar – “Three Good Reasons”
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