'Reservation Dogs' Revisits a Shameful Moment in American History (Spoilers)

Last edited Fri Aug 11, 2023, 06:39 AM - Edit history (1)

But Deer Lady’s sentiment doesn’t entirely fit the way that Reservation Dogs incorporates Native spirituality. In this show’s world, you can sometimes see things that aren’t real. And, for that matter, things can be real and unreal at the same time. Never has that been more clear than in this tragic, beautiful episode titled after the Deer Lady herself. It shows her in action, at the height of her mythical powers (played, as usual, by Kaniehtiio Horn from Letterkenny). But this time we also see the little girl (played by Georgeanne Growingthunder) she once was, and the context in which that girl sacrificed her humanity to become a spirit of vengeance.

The flashback segments of the episode take place in one of the many shameful chapters of Native mistreatment in our nation’s history, where Native children were taken away to “Indian training schools” run by various churches, with one goal in mind: to strip these children of every last trace of their own culture. Braids are chopped, English language lessons strictly enforced, Christianity drilled into kids who had been raised in other spiritual traditions. For some whites, it wasn’t enough to have killed so many Indigenous people and taken their land; the goal was to snuff out the very idea of being a Native American.

We see this play out in a collection of utterly brutal scenes where the nuns treat the young Deer Lady and her friends as something less than human. The episode (written by Sterlin Harjo, directed by Danis Goulet) makes a very smart stylistic choice: for a while at the school, we are hearing the white characters the way that the young Deer Lady hears them. The English dialogue sounds like it has been placed into a food processor, chopped up and reassembled at random, and then run through a few audio filters. These people do not see her as a person, but to her, they in turn may as well be one of Maximus’ star people.



https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-recaps/reservation-dogs-season-3-indian-training-schools-deer-lady-hulu-1234801699/amp/