‘Reservation Dogs’ Creator: Our Series Finale Is Just the Beginning
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This post contains spoilers for the series finale of Reservation Dogs, which we recapped here. The finale is now streaming on Hulu.
Why?
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This seems to be the most pressing question for Reservation Dogs co-creator Sterlin Harjo. The Indigenous teen comedy just finished its third and final season, having only improved as it’s gone along. Everyone watching seems to think that this is one of the great shows they’ve ever seen, and this is one of the great final seasons. So why would Harjo want to end things now, when FX would have obviously let him keep making the show for as long as he wants?
Harjo spoke about a lot of aspects of the finale with Rolling Stone — including the importance of ending things on a scene featuring Native movie legends Gary Farmer, Wes Studi, and Graham Greene — but we of course had to start with the question on the lips of every fan of the show.
This was an incredible season, maybe your best. Why end the show now?
It’s a coming-of-age. And at some point, they come of age. I feel like it’s this perfect story. And it felt like it needed to end. We could keep doing it. But I’m also more excited about where all of these people, these actors, these writers, it’s opened this door. If we just keep doing this show, what a great show it is, but it limits what else we’re going to do. We’re a small community, and I’m excited to see what everyone has coming next. It’s that important of a show to me, that I wanted to end it where I felt like it needed to end. Sometimes, less is more, and I think leaving an audience wanting more is a good place to me. It would crush me, it’s such a personal story, if I had executives, or an audience, or anyone, telling me, “That story is kind of over. Y’all should have ended a season ago.” Because it’s so personal. Every episode, there’s multiple things that I could point you to who was inspired by who in my family — who’s gone and no longer with us, but inspired this character or this moment. The stakes are so high, personally, because it is a personal story. But also, it’s a first of its kind, and it’s a story that represents Indian country. That’s a big task. Showrunning’s hard enough. And then you put the pressure on of, “Oh, you’re representing your people, that you love and care about, and your culture that you care about so much.” It’s a lot. But in the end, some of my favorite shows are two seasons and a special, like the English Office. I wanted more, but I don’t hate them for ending it. It’s perfect.
When I got to the end of this season’s eighth episode, and Kenny Boy’s speech is being contrasted with Maximus and Fixico reconciling, that really felt like it could have been the finale.
There’s a bit of the sentiment in Kenny Boy’s speech. I personally love our finale. It’s like, find me a better finale. It’s illustrating what Kenny Boy is saying. He gives this speech that sets up the idea of us being a community and being there for each other. And I wanted to show, culturally, this is how we do it. For me, it’s a very simple story. Season One, the kids lost their friend, and they are mourning that death and trying to get better. And then, by the time we get to Season Three, it’s like they get to take their lessons that they learned in Season One and Two, and they get to apply them in a real way to their community. And also reach out, and help their elders with what they’ve learned. There’s no way in my culture to represent that than how people come together [when someone dies]. We saw it a little bit with Mabel, and this one is, what happens after that?
Early in the finale, Lily Gladstone gives this speech about how the loved ones we lose are never really gone. That feels like another summation of not only the culture, but the idea that, yes, the show is going away, but it will always be with us in some respect. Was that something you had in mind?
For sure. This show will always be way more special anything I’ve ever made. I don’t care what I make after this. And I needed to tell everyone, “Thank you,” but also, “These characters are still alive, these characters keep going, and these stories keep going, and you can always go back to it.” And sometimes, our imagination, and what the audience fills in, is better than anything I could create. And it’s all true. Toward the end, Willie Jack gives a speech where she’s talking about not knowing where we’re going and what we’re doing, but we’ll always come back together, and we’ll go on forever. It’s kind of how I feel like the show is. It’s not over for me. It’s this world that we got to create, and sometimes your imagination and what you fill in the blank with, is the best thing I can give an audience — that’s active participation, not telling them. I think there’s an interesting thing with Native culture. If you look at European religion, it has this way of being definite, and saying, “We know the answers. It’s in this book, and you can read it,” whereas in Native culture, it’s more that we don’t know the answers. We literally use words like “the Great Mystery.” It’s illustrated in the show, that we don’t have the answers of what’s going to happen to these people, but we’ve done everything that we can to get them ready for the future. I think it’s a beautiful place where it ends. I always loved how sad and real and beautiful the end of Stand By Me was. There’s some sadness in there. There’s sadness in the end of this show. But there’s also hope. And if people get anything out of the show, it’s that it has a lot of heart. And we put our lives in it. That can break your heart sometimes. And it’s also very healing. We put it all on the table, and it was a gamble. I’m really glad that people responded to it so much. It’s cheesy to say, but I hope it continues to inspire and be with the audience that really fell in love with it.
One of this season’s main stories showed how the elders were once teenagers with problems just like the Rez Dogs. Where did the idea come from to do that particular episode set in the Seventies?
I’d actually talked about doing a whole season of that. It was always in my mind, this idea that everything’s connected and has lessons in it that can be used in the future. My mom went to the school that it’s based on, a school called Sequoyah Indian Boarding School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I just heard memories of that place, growing up with my mom talking about it. You had my grandparents, and they’re talking about the older boarding schools that were abusive, and you couldn’t speak your language. And by the time my mom was at Sequoyah, there was this pride and identity, and Native people were coming into their own, and taking over the schools. I grew up with these pictures of these Natives in bell-bottoms at this school, and I was like, “Man, no one has ever seen that.” I get a lot of comments about how each episode feels like a movie, and we get to dive into different genres and tones and styles with each one. Throughout the history of cinema, we’ve been stuck in this bottle of, “This is what you are, and this is the only thing you are.” We got the freedom to tell our own story, and I wanted to show how wildly diverse, and how interesting our stories are. You’ve got the Deer Lady and the abuse of the boarding schools and taking away people’s language. But then you also have this Seventies moment at the same school, and now you have a Native coach, you have the tribes taking over these places. And all of a sudden, these kids are more cultured, they’re listening to rock & roll and driving hot rods and stuff. I wanted to show people a bunch of things that no one’s ever seen. No one’s ever seen a woman that’s part deer, killing fucked-up guys in rural Oklahoma. Or something like the Seventies episode, as well.
White producers and casting directors talk a lot about how hard it is to find Indigenous actors. You not only found more than enough for one show, but then essentially came up with a second cast for what would have been the Seventies version.
Oh, yeah. That was part of it. I once had a project with Alexander Payne that was picked up by Showtime. This was back in the old days, and he was an executive producer on it. And he left the project because he decided that there weren’t enough Native actors to do a show. I disagreed with him, obviously. And I proved him wrong. We can make five different shows, right now, with just the actors I saw who auditioned. We have just amazing talent. It’s like, what are you afraid of? Just because they’re not central casting in L.A., you think there’s no other actors out there? Give me a break. You have to do the work, you have to not be lazy, you have to go into people’s communities to find people, because they’re filled with people with talent, but you have to do a little work. It’s not as easy as casting Friends.
Speaking of casting, what is something you would tell a director or casting director about each of your four leads if they were thinking of hiring them?
Lane [Factor] had never really acted before he did this show. Everyone will tell you this: He is the purest, sweetest soul on set. It’s the same with his character. He walks into the room, and you just feel like life’s OK. You feel like there’s this innocence, but also wisdom, in this young man. To see him come in, never do this before, but not be afraid, was truly remarkable. His sister’s also talented. She happens to be a lead in the Seventies episode. I don’t know what their parents did to make them great actors, but you could cast him in so many different roles, and he is up for it. He just has a sensitivity to it that you can’t write. And he brings that to the character every time.
If you look at Willie Jack, Paulina [Alexis], she is Native humor. She is the magic that we tried to capture, and I was afraid I couldn’t capture, as a filmmaker. Because I could not tell you the definition of Native humor, but I know when it’s hitting me, and I hear it whenever I’m with my family. And Paulina, effortlessly, is Native humor. But also, she can turn on a dime and pull out the emotions that she has, and bring out some heartwarming, just destroy you humanity to Willie Jack, and the sadness that she feels for her cousin. She could do that; you just gotta ask her to do it. And you also gotta get out of her way. And she’ll give you magic every time.
Devery [Jacobs], you just have pure talent. She’s a serious, hardworking writer, director, actor. And she can do all of those. And she will make your project, and the characters you’re writing, better. That’s why she ended up in the writers room. She would tell me things that were about the character: “I don’t think Elora would do this,” or “What do you think about Elora doing this?” At some point, she was making the character even better — making everything better. And I knew that she needed to be in the writers room. To have someone who’s a triple threat, who can do all of these things and be very talented at all of them, and they’re playing one of your main characters? That is so comforting. You put your trust in them. And they help lead you.
And then you have D’Pharaoh. I was so proud of D’Pharaoh. He’s great in all the seasons, but Season Three, he had a lot to carry, and a lot of vulnerability to show. And he has no ego. He took it very seriously. He was always kind of hard on himself, but this season, I saw him grow into this actor who is very comfortable with his craft, and he knows how to turn it on, and he knows where to go. He has one of the harder roles to play. You’re a person going through major transition, and you see it happening on his face. You waffle a little bit, but you have to carry this story and keep the audience behind you. That’s a very hard line to walk, and he does it with such talent and grace. I was really blown away with how good he was in the Maximus episode. He has this curiosity in him that comes through. He’s one of those people where you want to hang out with him all the time. He reminds you of why you do art, and and he reminds you of why you’re here on this Earth, because of that curiosity. And he brings that to that character, and it makes people want to follow him throughout the story.
We see in the finale that Bear and Jackie have started dating in between episodes. Other than that, there may not be a show about teenagers in the history of television that’s been less interested in dating, crushes, or any kind of romantic tension. Why was that?
It’s weird. Every time I would start going down the road of who’s dating who, it just felt very shallow. We meet these characters in this moment where they’re dealing with really big things of life and death. It feels like love was put on the back burner while they dealt with this. They were dealing with the loss of someone that they loved dearly, and the soul-crushing feeling they got after he was ripped from them. Because of that, to go and have them be concerned with love or crushes too much, just felt cheap. We tried, we talked about it. It just never felt quite right. I think with this show, a lot of things did happen in between episodes. That’s what I love about the start-and-stop nature of television, specifically 30-minute comedies where you get to dip in and out, and there are things that happen in between, like their romance.
In the finale, you put Graham Greene, Wes Studi, and Gary Farmer onscreen together, and you even built the final scene of the series around them.
I wanted to have them all in the last frame with Casey [Camp-Horinek]. You have to. Having those legends of Indigenous cinema there, they are the people that carried us on their back, throughout the hardest years of being a Native in this industry. They had to do a lot of things and sacrifice a lot of things so we could get to where we are making Reservation Dogs. In our culture, we respect our elders. And I needed to basically give them the opportunity to be who they are, and celebrate who they are. In the finale, they are celebrating the work that they have done, even though they are playing characters. When they say, “To the next one” at the end, it’s not just about their friend passing. It’s also, like, “There’s going to be another show, and there’s going to be other films now. And we did this, and we helped create this opportunity for all of us. And you in the audience, you’re going to see us again, we’re going to be doing something together.” That was my thank you and nod to an audience and to the critics and everyone that’s been so good to us, and gone on this journey with us. I understand that it’s a hard thing to do, to make this show. And there’s going to be more now, because of it. I think that is what Reservation Dogs is. It’s this project that people love, but we created more opportunity for everyone. Now there’s more directors, actors, writers, people who didn’t do any of these things before the show existed, and they now will move on and incorporate what they’ve learned. The creation of the show is the show. It’s about community. Lily gives this speech about how Old Man Fixico’s not gone, he is a part of all of us, and this is how community works: We take bits and pieces of it. And it’s the same thing with Reservation Dogs. It’s not gone. It’s a part of everything now, and it’ll always be there. And it’s going to influence everything that everyone does who got an opportunity on our show.
Finally, the last time we talked, you and Rutherford Falls and Dark Winds were all dropping new episodes around the same time. Now you’ve ended and Rutherford Falls got canceled. Dark Winds is getting a third season, but for the moment, that’s it. Yet you seem very optimistic that this moment is going to carry on and continue, rather than being this temporary moment. Why is that?
It’ll carry on and continue because I know what’s out there and what’s being developed right now. And there’s some amazing stuff being developed. With the fans of this show, it’s opened up this idea of what a Native show can be. I think that executives and whoever will be less afraid to do an Indigenous show now. But I’m personally going to be making feature films after this, as soon as the strikes end. It’s already happening.
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