If there’s one turn of phrase that Bear, Elora, and the rest of the Reservation Dogs cast love the most, it’s gotta be “shitass.”
For three seasons, characters young and old have spouted it back and forth, up and down the fictional streets of the fictional Oklahoma reservation town of Okern. Sometimes it’s used as an insult, sometimes as a term of endearment. More often than not, however, “shitass” is something in between—a call-out that speaks to one’s lovable qualities as well as one’s flaws. It’s the kind of thing that only people who know you say.
Okern and its “shitass” shout-filled streets are where the five teenagers who’ve spent years calling themselves the “Rez Dogs” grew up, and in Wednesday’s finale, it becomes the site of a tearful goodbye. Some will stay, and some will go, but each of the teens has found at least some well-earned resolution after a couple very rough years.
For some viewers, this might feel too soon. Since its 2021 premiere, Reservation Dogs has stood as one of a stark few TV series to capture the Native American experience, and its inventive writing and phenomenal performances could’ve stretched far beyond the three seasons FX and Hulu gave it. At the same time, there’s something fitting about the precise way this beloved show has chosen to say goodbye.
[Warning: Spoilers for Reservation Dogs Season 3 ahead.]
When we first met Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor), they were grieving an incomprehensible loss: Their friend Daniel had committed suicide in their shared hideout. By Season 2, the friends’ relationships had crumbled; Elora and Bear were more or less giving one another the silent treatment, and Cheese had begun to pull away from the group entirely. It was Willie Jack who found the catharsis they all needed in Season 2’s ninth episode, “Offerings,” when she visited her aunt and Daniel’s mother Hokti (Lily Gladstone) in prison. Their meeting, along with a follow-up session during the season finale, capture the message that reverberates throughout the series like a heartbeat.
When she first sits down with Hokti, Willie Jack feels lost and overwhelmed. She doesn’t know how to bring her friends together in spite of their shared grief over Daniel. But Hokti teaches her how to listen to herself through prayer. She reminds her niece of the stories she’d told her growing up about their forebears—caretakers who held their community together during forced migration. “Men and women, their songs led us through the dark,” she says. “They’re watching you, my girl. You don’t need me. You have them. This is the power we carry. When you really pray, they’re all around you all the time.”
For three seasons, Reservation Dogs has challenged the concept that an individual person is an island, illustrating in moments like these how a community binds people together, empowering us to be our best selves. (Sometimes, this means a pep talk over vending machine snacks; other times, it means razzing each other with words like “shitass.”) Through community, the teens have learned, you can find everything a person could want—love, security, and even, as the finale’s memorial for the medicine man Old Man Fixico (Richard Ray Whitman) demonstrates, a kind of immortality.
The series finale even calls back to Willie Jack and Hokti’s Season 2 meeting when Willie Jack returns for more advice about grieving—with another armful of vending machine snacks in hand as an offering. Although Willie Jack worries that she didn’t have enough time to learn all that Old Man Fixico could have taught her, Hokti reframes the idea; all of his loved ones will carry on a piece of his teachings, Hokti reminds her niece.
“That’s how community works,” Hokti says. “It’s sprawling; it spreads. What do you think they came for when they tried to get rid of us? Our community. You break that, you break the individual.” Although he might be dead, she emphasized, “Fixico isn’t gone. He’s right here—between you and me.”
As much solace as Reservation Dogs might want its viewers to find in its understanding of community, the series also carries a vital reminder of how white America has tried to destroy that source of power. The show has spent three seasons mining comedy from Native American stereotypes and offensive gas-station fortune-telling machines, but it’s also offered a serious, sometimes harrowing look at some of the genocidal policies and horrific abuses that white America has rained down on the Indigenous population. That effort came into even sharper focus in Season 3’s third episode, the ’70s horror-tinged “Deer Lady”—focuses on the terrifying abuse and cultural annihilation Indigenous children faced in residential schools designed to force assimilation. (Last year, the Department of the Interior found that the federal government had run 408 such boarding schools between 1819 and 1969.) The episode might just go down as the best in the series.
Over and over, this season has offered lessons in, as Hokti put it, “how community works”—how it can bolster us up, and how, in other moments, we can wind up carrying one another’s pain as our own, even if it isn’t good for us. When Old Man Fixico first has his heart attack in Episode 8, Willie Jack and the teens rush to spring his estranged “cousin-brother” Maximus out of the hospital. When the kids inevitably get caught, the perpetual scoundrel Kenny Boy (a full adult) decides to take the heat for them. As far as he’s concerned, allowing the kids to be punished for such a well intentioned deed wouldn’t serve the greater good.
At this point, each of Daniel’s friends has discovered a path back to their community. Elora is setting off for college and forging a new bond with her previously absent father (played by Ethan Hawke!). Cheese has found family and solace in Grandma Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek) who is not a blood relative but, as he’s learned, might as well be. Willie Jack has accepted that she wants to stay in Okern and carry on its traditions, and Bear has made peace with William Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth)—the mercurial, often ineffectual spirit that sometimes leads him down the wrong path.
As Bear tells Knifeman, he’s learned that he doesn’t need to be “the only leader.” Instead, he says, “I’m from an amazing community and I’m just proud to be a part of it.” An overjoyed Knifeman agrees: “We don’t need more chiefs—we need more warriors!”
Narratively, this ending is beyond satisfying; it was co-creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi themselves who chose to end the series here, a deliberate decision that shows through in the writing. The only disappointment comes from an unnecessary scarcity; why are shows like Reservation Dogs still so rare? (Jana Schmieding even appears in the finale, reminding us that the excellent Rutherford Falls, in which she also starred, was canceled after two seasons on Peacock.) The reason might not be too distinct from the boarding schools this season depicted—or from the ongoing conservative effort to dismantle any history education that does not glamorize America’s white colonizers.
And yet, for three beautiful, sensitive, often irreverent seasons, there Reservation Dogs has been. Its performances—particularly those from its young cast and stand-outs like Goldtooth and Zahn McClarnon as Officer Big—are natural enough to risk obscuring the skill that went into them. On screen, Woon-A-Tai, Jacobs, Alexis, and Factor have built a small community among themselves that feels not just believable but alive—prone to ups and downs, susceptible to fractures and scars, but also, somehow, bigger than the individuals themselves. The kinship that the Reservation Dogs share is the kind of friendship that’s big enough, strong enough, and deep enough to be redemptive.
It’s the word they use all the time: love. As in, “Love you, bitch.”
Correction: This post has been amended to accurately name the performer who plays Cheese’s “grandma.”
