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Neal Powless and his friends ran inside and crowded around a little TV during a birthday party in 1985 to watch “Windwalker.” The ’80s western was voiced almost entirely in the Indigenous languages Crow and Cheyenne with English subtitles. He recalled it was one of the only times he and his friends had seen themselves represented truthfully in any of the many movies and TV they watched.

“Here we (were) watching our people on film,” Powless said. “It became a novelty to see ourselves on film.”

The Newhouse IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility) Committee hosted a viewing of Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo’s “Reservation Dogs” Monday night for Indigenous Peoples’ Day. A question and answer session with Powless, who is from the Onondaga Nation, followed the screening, which was held in Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. Powless is the university ombuds and is pursuing a Ph.D. at SU in the study of Indigenous imagery in major motion picture films.

The show is the first American series to be written, produced and directed by all Indigenous North Americans. It follows Elora (Devery Jacobs), Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Cheese (Lane Factor) and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) as they wander their Oklahoma reservation stealing everything from cars to grocery items in the hopes of turning a profit they could use to leave the reservation and go to California. Their makeshift gang becomes known as the best bandits on reservation, and they are dubbed “The Reservation Dogs.”

“Reservation Dogs” flips a lot of the scripts that have surrounded the image of the Indigenous American, said Powless, who spent most of his life on a reservation.

The three-time All-American lacrosse player worked as cultural consultant and then co-producer on “Crooked Arrows,” a film about a Native American lacrosse team. Following the screenings of two episodes of “Reservation Dogs,” Powless compared and contrasted “Crooked Arrows” and the new Hulu show multiple times.

The role of Indigenous characters in Hollywood is torrid, filled with victimization, antagonism and stereotypes that can be traced to the very roots of the industry, he said.

“In the early days of the first uses of film, Indigenous people were some of the first people shot on film,” Powless said. “They were taking Indigenous people and putting them on film because the assumption was that they were going to disappear.”

Those early films show Indigenous people primarily while they perform ceremonies and rituals, Powless said. While “Reservation Dogs” shows those moments, they are in a different context. The first episode ends with a funeral-like ceremony, where the four friends burn herbs and create an altar dedicated to their friend who died a year ago.

In this scene, the four stand in suits and ties — a rodeo-tie and cowboy hat over intricate braids for Willie Jack — against the smoky background of the abandoned building they hang out at, in a more obvious reference to the show title’s partial inspiration, “Reservoir Dogs” by Quentin Tarantino, an audience member at the event pointed out.

The series is full of pop culture references — from “The Lord of the Rings” to “Willow” — to capitalize on the importance of pop culture to Indigenous communities living on reservations. Powless recalled that growing up, he and his friends took in so much mass media, but they rarely saw accurate representations of themselves in any of that content. This made the honesty of “Reservation Dogs” in its portrayal of Indigenous characters so much more meaningful, Powless said.

While the show will expand the perceptions of Indigenous people to white audiences, it is even more important for Indigenous audiences to see themselves in media they can relate to, said Soo Yeon Hong, a visual communications professor and organizer of the event.

The show is the first series to be shot entirely in Oklahoma, another example of cultural accuracy in the series. Because it’s shot in the West, viewers get an “authentic experience of a Native space,” Powless said.

Sophomore Curtiss Summers attended the screening and said the show’s success in the mainstream was “heart-warming.”

“It’s really good, like when I first saw it, it hit spot-on with everything that I know from living on a reservation. The characters I saw were people I knew from the reservation,” Summers said. “When they went to the Emmys, it just made me feel good to see other Native Americans make it that far.”

Powless also spoke about spirituality in Indigenous life and the way that is portrayed in the show. In “Reservation Dogs,” the relationship between the characters and the spirit realm is constantly explored. Bear is plagued by a spirit called William “Spirit” Knifeman, who gives him life advice about being a warrior and doing right for one’s people.

Knifeman is presented as just another character in the show; Bear is never scared or surprised by his presence. On the reservation, the belief in the spirit world is an integral truth, something that transcends time and space in the Indigenous perspective towards the dead, Powless said. He remembered talking to his friends when the movie “Paranormal Activity” came out, saying, “Those people were so dumb, all they had to do was talk to those spirits, leave some food out, and it would have been fine.”

In his time as a producer and cultural consultant on “Crooked Arrows,” Powless consciously employed some stereotypes when he approved costume design so that both Indigenous and white audiences would see the character “throw away the costume” by the time the full story arc had played out, he said. “Reservation Dogs,” though, was refreshing in its aversion to any one accepted archetype of the Indigenous American, he added.

“This type of stuff is really exciting to see because they don’t even go for any stereotypes, they just go and do it,” Powless said.

Published on October 12, 2021 at 12:47 am

Contact Sydney: sypollac@syr.edu