Spoilers follow for the second season of Reservation Dogs through its finale episode, “I Still Believe.â€
It took two seasons, but the Rez Dogs made it to California. And while White Jesus (Incubus front man Brandon Boyd) led them to the Pacific Ocean that their friend Daniel (Dalton Cramer) so badly wanted to see, the healing the group experienced there was all Okern. The Rez Dogs are growing up, and the season-two finale, “I Still Believe,†emphasizes a point that series co-creator, writer, and director Sterlin Harjo and the Reservation Dogs team have been making all season: Cultural traditions, teachings, and ceremony passed down from elders have power and strength wherever you encounter them. They don’t have to be perfectly authentic — a Tom Petty song or a Star Wars–affiliated phrase can both work — but the affirmation they provide endures.
Reservation Dogs has explored the idea that titular friends Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor) are, like so many teenagers, looking for answers that might not be so easily found and feeling powerless in a community with limited resources. Since season one, they’ve struggled with grief and confusion over Daniel’s death by suicide: Did they let him down by not realizing what he was going through? Or were his parents to blame for not grasping the depth of his pain and frustration? The group’s secret hangout becomes a memorial for Daniel, photos of him hang in the homes of Willie Jack and Elora, and a note from him is enshrined in Cheese’s journal. His loss is defining for the Rez Dogs and for the entire community: There was a time before Daniel’s death and after it, and the latter feels impossible to navigate.
In the first season, staying in Okern feels so hopeless for Elora and Bear that they decide to leave for California, as Daniel had dreamed, while Willie Jack and Cheese — thanks to conversations with Willie Jack’s father and Cheese’s adoptive grandmother, respectively — choose to stay behind. This intended breakup transforms into a more bitter divide at the end of the season-one finale, “Satvrday,†when Elora abandons Bear and hits the road with his enemy Jackie (Elva Guerra), leading to Willie Jack’s declaration in the season-two premiere, “The Curse,†that “things are all messed up around here.†Okern’s whole vibe is off, from Dallas Goldtooth’s William Knifeman, or Spirit, shrugging off Bear’s requests for instruction after spending so much of season one badgering him, to the Rez Dogs’s hangout being sold to a Texan rancher building a megachurch, to Daniel’s family home being put up for rent. The place the teens thought they knew is changing, and they have no say in the transformation that’s leaving them behind.
How to move forward? How to find purpose and meaning when inexplicable things are happening all the time? The second season of Reservation Dogs answers those questions by taking the vow Willie Jack’s father, Leon (Jon Proudstar), pledges to her — “If you need to leave, I’m here for you. I’ll always be here for you†— and imagining what Okern’s older generations being present for the younger would look like.
To do so, the series used its two extra episodes this season to illuminate the adults the teens have turned to for help. “Wide Net,†which unfurled the lifelong friendship between Bear’s mother, Rita (Sarah Podemski), Elora’s aunt, Teenie (Tamara Podemski), Jackie’s aunt, Bev (Jana Schmieding), and their friend Natalie (Nathalie Standingcloud), dug into the resentment between Rita and Teenie for the former’s decision to stay in Okern and the latter’s to leave. Meanwhile, “This Is Where the Plot Thickens†is a follow-up to season one’s “Come and Get Your Love†in furthering the bond between the law-abiding lighthorseman Big (Zahn McClarnon) and the murderous Deer Lady spirit (Kaniehtiio Horn), whose “Be good†directive to Big in his childhood shaped his entire life. These vignettes depict both how Okern’s citizens stick together and have meaningful liaisons with the transcendental world and, as the disconnected Rez Dogs look for mentorship in season two, how these same parents, uncles, and aunties serve as intermediaries between the spirits aiming to provide counsel and the teens hoping to receive it. In learning from their elders this season, the Rez Dogs found themselves and refound one another.
Over and over, the teens were on the receiving end of varyingly useful adult advice. Some of it was thoughtful, some of it was goofy, and some of it was white-people nonsense, but Reservation Dogs took the time to present it, share the teens’ immediate reaction to it, and then track how it affected their behavior. On the impractical end of things, there was Anna, Megan Mullally’s God- and Gloria Steinem–loving divorcée, whose suggestion in “Run†that Elora distrust men is overshadowed by her reliance on ranch dressing as a food group. In “Roofing,†it’s amusing when Uncle Charley (Nathan Apodaca) pops edibles before taking Bear on his first roofing job, but his advice to work emotionally instead of pragmatically isn’t helpful. Amber Midthunder and Elisha Pratt’s Indigenous influencers in “Decolonativization†share a romanticized view of Native American history but have no idea how to define the “decolonization†ideology they insist the teens enact. Marc Maron’s Gene in “Stay Gold, Cheesy Boy†forces Cheese and the other young men in his group home to abide by rules shaped by AA’s 12-step program and his bungled understanding of Indigenous sayings, but he has no interest in actually bettering the boys’ lives. Gene’s assumption that whatever he says will be unquestioningly followed is authoritarianism, not aid, and Reservation Dogs sets up characters like Gene, Anna, MissM8tri@rch, and Augusto to show how the teens’ youth and inexperience make them a target for other people’s projections and expectations. “These kids, man,†Uncle Charley says in a moment of irritation with Bear, but what the Rez Dogs need is guidance, not dismissal.
Once Elora, Bear, Willie Jack, and Cheese voice that desire, the moments of poignancy, patience, compassion, and confession they experience with the community elders who answer their request enable the catharsis of “I Still Believe.†These lessons in cultural tradition and ceremony are provided through didacticism and conversation, collaboration and mysticism, and they allow further glimpses into what Cheese calls the elders’ “very complicated lives†— they’re not flattened heroes but people whose own hardships and anxieties open their hearts to others. In “The Curse†and “Run,†former best friends and romantic rivals Uncle Brownie (Gary Farmer) and Bucky (Wes Studi) put their old beefs aside to help Willie Jack and Cheese reverse the curse she put on Jackie. At a river’s edge, Uncle Brownie and Bucky, urged on by Spirit, sing a heartwarmingly off-key rendition of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’†and tell Willie Jack and Cheese about the restorative power of water: “Let this water here wash away all that bad medicine … The water will just take it away.†Later, in “I Still Believe,†Willie Jack will try her own karaoke version of “Free Fallin’†before encouraging Elora to step into the Pacific Ocean to let her fear of forgetting Daniel pass. It’s an imperfect re-creation of what Uncle Brownie and Bucky did, which itself was an imperfect ritual, but as an attempt to give oneself over to the curative quality of nature, it works.
The latter half of this season is full of such instances of mimicry, which make clear how the Rez Dogs are listening, learning, and doing their best to honor and engage with rituals that provide reassurance. Willie Jack’s behavior in “I Still Believe†is a perfect bookend to the profound spiritual experience she had in “Offerings,†in which her aunt — Daniel’s mother, Hokti (Lily Gladstone) — is encouraged by her guardian spirit, Gram (Tafv Sampson), to perform a prayer for Willie Jack. In that otherworldly moment, Hokti summons generations of caretakers, healers, and storytellers to surround Willie Jack and remind her she is never alone; Gram reaching out to touch Willie Jack’s shoulder is a physical complement to this emotional relief. The fact that Hokti is in prison, or that Willie Jack has never done a ceremony like this before, is irrelevant. The knowledge that Hokti interprets from Gram and holds within herself can be transferred to anyone anywhere as long as they’re a willing recipient, and the result is both a kind of apology for the elders, who, as Willie Jack complains, are “avoiding shit all the fucking time,†and an inspiration for Willie Jack to try to channel this power herself.
To her disappointment, Willie Jack’s attempt to bring the ancestors back for Elora, Bear, and Cheese doesn’t quite work. But Hokti’s other lessons about using food to create a shared experience (which Willie Jack does via a wild-onion egg scramble, a dish we also see in “Mabelâ€) and providing a safe space “with intention†for friends and loved ones are clearly priorities Willie Jack will carry forward.
The other Rez Dogs absorb a number of teachings, too. Spirit’s perspective on grief (“You go through all of it so that they know that they can go, that we’ll miss them, but that we’ll be okay without themâ€) from “Roofing†shapes what Bear says in “I Still Believe†about finding closure after Daniel’s death. The myriad aunties who take charge in “Mabel†by cooking fry bread, sitting at Elora’s grandmother’s bedside, and sharing stories about her are evoked by Elora in “Stay Gold, Cheesy Boy†when she tries to break Cheese out of the group home by saying she’s his auntie; the indignation in her voice when she points out that “he’s pretty much been in my care for the past two years†reflects the protective role she’ll step into for the people she loves. And in that same episode, Cheese shares how he’s tried to be more like Daniel, his hero, after his death, a personal manifestation of an elder’s credo: “I just thought that maybe if I treated others the way they wanted to be treated, they would do the same.â€
All this experience and education are essential to “I Still Believe,†in which the Rez Dogs follow Daniel’s dream to California. At a gas-station stop, Bear scoffs at the “Medicine†Man fortune-telling machine and its message “You must pave new ways,†but the wisdom from this cash-accepting spirit (voiced by Goldtooth) ends up being surprisingly beneficial. While the teens stand in the Pacific Ocean, they make real their versions of the Okern elders’ practices — a song, a prayer, a walk into the water, and an embrace — and, just as the Medicine Man advised, start a fresh chapter in their memory of Daniel, in their friendship with one another, and in their identities as Indigenous people. In honoring the ceremonies of the past and the wisdom of inherited knowledge, Reservation Dogs’s exemplary second season found hope for the future.