First, a story.

So this one time some rez kids messed up my car. It was my first "real" car.
I'd had a '67 Catalina that started about half the time, and went off the
road the other half because the tires were worn down to nubs. And then I'd
had a '79 Thunderbird that everyone called the "Thunderchicken" because it
had a broken door and one of the eight cylinders didn't work. This new car
was sensible: a 1993 Honda Accord done up in pale blue.

It was 1994. I was driving from Bemidji, Minnesota, back to my house, on the
edge of the Leech Lake Reservation. I'd dropped out of grad school the year
before and come back home. It was the right thing to do, the only thing: I'd
moved away when I was 17, and now I was 23 and I felt disconnected, adrift on
American seas, invisible in a way only Native people can understand.

Anyway, it was a good night. My brother and a buddy and I had gone to the
movie theater to see Speed. We were headed home and had turned onto Lake
Avenue and suddenly--pop-pop-pop--my car was under attack. And I just knew it
was those Metallica-T-shirt and nunchuck kids from nearby throwing rocks at
my ride. That's where they hung out, on the south side of town. I slammed on
the brakes and said, "Let's get 'em."

It had to be Cheyenne and Charlie and Robbie and Davey and Ogema. Some of
these kids were brothers--like, actual brothers--but they were all related in
that Indian way. I got out of the car and walked through a cornfield to
surprise them. The corn was high and waxy, and the leaves looked wet under
the sodium lamps. I heard them whispering. They're by the road. Naw, dog, I
can hear them. Yeah, that's them. And then ... Oh shit! I saw them: bushy
hair, baggy jeans, skater-punk tees. They turned to run just as I jumped out
of the corn. I think they actually screamed.

I put my hands on Cheyenne's shirt and lifted him up on his toes. "Is that
you, Cheyenne? That you throwing shit at my car?" "I didn't know it was
yours!" he yelled. "I didn't know it was yours!" I shook him a few more times
while I said something about the car being new, how they could throw rocks at
white people but should leave me and my car alone. Then they took off into
the night. And that's the story about how my first real car got fucked up by
a bunch of Indian kids.

In 2021, I was surprised to see those kids again--different names, different
tribes--stealing a truckload of Flaming Flamers chips in the opening minutes
of the FX series Reservation Dogs. The same restless energy, the same quick
patter, the same easy style.

The setup of the show is simple: Four kids living on an Oklahoma reservation
commit petty crimes to bankroll an escape to California. They're motivated by
the death of their friend Daniel, which happened the year before the series
opens. Bear, Elora, Cheese, and Willie Jack have been friends all their
life--more than friends, actually. They are unofficial siblings and cousins,
and Daniel was family to them, too. His absence drives the first season.
Reservation Dogs is an ensemble comedy, full of mischief and warmth, but it's
also a powerful portrait of unresolved grief.

Read: Reservation Dogs is as fresh as it gets

Reservation Dogs has been a critical hit for FX, earning widespread praise
and landing on multiple lists of the best TV of 2021. Its second season
premieres in August. The series was co-created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika
Waititi, the Maori filmmaker from New Zealand known for depicting the lives
of Indigenous people with wry humor. Waititi had already achieved mass-market
success: He won an Academy Award for his film Jojo Rabbit, directed the
Marvel movies Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder, and is now
developing a Star Wars movie. But this is Sterlin Harjo's first TV show, and
his biggest project to date. Reservation Dogs came most directly from his
brain.

This was a show like I'd never seen before: a show that was about me and my
life, that was somehow made for me.
Harjo, 42, grew up in Holdenville, Oklahoma, more or less on the seam between
Muscogee and Seminole territory; he belongs to both tribes. He has made three
feature films, two documentaries, and multiple shorts, all of which deal
intimately with Native life--but nothing has captured mainstream attention
quite like this show.

Three years ago, I destroyed Harjo at pool at one of his favorite bars in
Tulsa, where he now lives. I'd known him casually for more than a decade,
through the network of Indian creatives who end up bumping into one another
at powwows and conferences and festivals. But that night in Tulsa was our
longest hangout yet, and I remember how excited he was to show me his
Oklahoma--to have me try his favorite barbecue and listen to a local honky-
tonk band he loved. "Check these guys out," he said admiringly. "They're so
Tulsa." (Harjo ended up using their music in an episode of Reservation Dogs.)

When I reached out to him again recently, he was in Los Angeles for two
awards ceremonies. So we met at the rooftop restaurant at the Waldorf Astoria
Beverly Hills. It was strange. And by it I mean the caviar french fries and
the way the waiters brought us a few things "courtesy of the chef" and
generally seeing Harjo as a part of the Hollywood machine, although he seemed
exactly as he's always seemed. When an Indian asks for another Indian's bona
fides, the highest praise you can give is to say "He's a community guy." It
means that he knows where he's from, and he still hangs out there. He
actually likes his fellow Indians. He hunts and gathers food and goes to
ceremonies, and you're just as likely to see him at the local QuikTrip
convenience store as anywhere else.

Harjo is a community guy. He's got the same slightly greasy hair and big
smile as he did when I first met him. The same taste in hipster hats that
would look lame on another guy but just work on Harjo. The same Seminole and
Muscogee bling (chest plate, bracelets) that he's always worn. Still, we both
felt a certain mischievous glee in ordering those caviar fries. It was like
we were counting coup on an industry, or a better life, or an establishment
that had for a long time frozen out people like us. Like: How much can we get
away with?

There's a spirit like that in Reservation Dogs, a sly giddiness. Stifled by
the ways of their elders and the limited opportunities of rez life, the four
kids dream of escaping to a freer, more exciting future. They navigate
standard-issue teen drama--a driver's test, a turf battle with a rival
neighborhood crew--but they also face the very specific challenges of being
young Indians who must decide what their own commitment to community will be.
Over time, they are repeatedly pulled apart and thrust back together, and
their goal of leaving the reservation becomes more complicated as they
discover that their connection to home is deeper than they'd thought.
Watching Reservation Dogs, I realized that this was a show like I'd never
seen before: a show that was about me and my life, that was somehow made for
me. And by me, I mean us. And by us, I mean Indians.

Harjo and Waititi first met almost two decades ago. Harjo described a feeling
of immediate kinship between the two. Their fathers were similar--both into
Harleys, both into "Native shit." Harjo and Waititi would meet for drinks and
wind each other up and tell stories from home. They gelled, Harjo said, in a
"community way."

They'd already been friends for 15 years when Waititi told Harjo he had a
deal at FX and asked if he had any TV pitches brewing, Harjo recalled. The
two men traded a few ideas, and Harjo wrote up some notes, just the bare
bones of a concept for a show. He sent them to Waititi, who pitched the idea
to FX. The network said that they'd never heard of anything like it. Harjo
had a deal for a pilot the next day. "It happened so fast," he said. "I got a
call from my agents. They were like: 'What the fuck is Reservation Dogs?'?"
Waititi told me that there was no better person to direct this story than
Harjo. "It's so deeply personal to him," he said.

I'm sure it's true that FX executives hadn't ever seen anything quite like
Harjo's pitch. For decades, onscreen depictions of Indian life largely
consisted of a tragic Native man reining in his horse on a windswept
southwestern plain or, worse, standing on a roadside crying at the sight of
litter. On the rare occasions when a Native character had a speaking part, he
was most likely astride a horse on a butte yelling "You'll always be my
friend!" to some white man he'd served loyally. Or explaining to an
interloper, in a weird, stilted monotone, something like "You're on tribal
land and your white-man laws don't apply here" while wearing an ill-fitting
Pendleton vest and a bolo tie. In the 1950s, countless Westerns and Western-
themed TV shows evoked hackneyed ideas, images, and myths surrounding Native
people. In shows like The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke, Indians were stoic,
comically impassive, sphinxlike.