In Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo’s new FX series, Reservation Dogs, premiering today, four Indigenous teenagers long to leave their reservation in rural Oklahoma. Played by a dynamic young cast of up-and-comers—D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Devery Jacobs, Paulina Alexis, and Lane Factor—the foursome plans to flee to the exotic land of California; but first they must lie, fight, and steal in order to secure the money for their getaway. In the show’s opening sequence, they pull off a heist in which they steal a truck full of chips. Yes, they get some cash for selling the truck—but way more importantly, they get to keep the chips.
As the four teens plot their grand escape, we’re offered an intimate glimpse into their lives on “the rez,” as they call it—both the good and the bad. While they have, on the one hand, a robust community there, they also lack resources and opportunities. (We learn that the four friends have recently lost one of their peers, Daniel, his death vaguely attributed to “where they live.”) Along the way, we’re also introduced to something that’s been missing on television for a long time: Indigenous humor. The show reminds you often of how badly Native people have been treated, but it encourages you to laugh about it too.
Reservation Dogs is the amalgamation of two projects that Waititi and Harjo—two close friends and fellow filmmakers—had been working on separately. From the start, they agreed that they wanted to make Native people laugh—the way that, say, 1998’s Smoke Signals had. “One thing about our stories from home is they’re always funny, so we knew we were going to do something humorous,” Harjo says. “There hasn’t been any Native humor onscreen, and I’ve always wanted to bring it to a mainstream audience. Native humor is very sophisticated.”
The series serves up the jokes by taking classic Hollywood stereotypes about Native Americans and flipping them on their head, often with biting results. In the first episode, for instance, Bear (Woon-A-Tai) is visited by the ghost of a horse-riding warrior named William Knife-Man, a play on the mystical Indian figure Hollywood once loved to plant in country-western films. But stoic he is not: William is goofy, a bit pathetic, and often complains about being stuck in the beyond. “The spirit world is cold,” he says. “My nipples are always hard.” In episode two, moreover, we’re treated to a delightful cameo from Jana Schmieding as a sarcastic clinic receptionist; she nails that element of Indigenous humor in which a lot is revealed through a single expression.
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