Reservation Dogs and Grief Work
What four Indigenous teenagers can teach us about grief and trauma recovery
Content warning: self-harm
Spoiler alert: some elements of the show’s plot are revealed
Reservation Dogs is a TV series that centers on the lives of four Indigenous teenagers — Bear, Elora, Willie Jack (my personal favorite character), and Cheese — who live in a reservation community of the Muscogee Nation in fictional Okern, Oklahoma. Together they form a gang called the “Rez Dogs.”
One of the central storylines highlights how the Rez Dogs, and their broader community, wrestle with grief over the loss of their friend/cousin Daniel. Daniel lived in an abusive family situation and died by suicide about a year before the show’s events begin. The fog of sadness from Daniel’s death hovers over the lives of the community and the Rez Dogs. Willie Jack talks to his picture on her wall in the mornings. Elora replays the memories of her last encounters with Daniel and wonders what she could have done differently to help him. They blame themselves for not doing more. The pain of their grief also comes out sideways as the Rez Dogs participate in all kinds of mischief and (sometimes illegal) shenanigans.
How will the Rez Dogs navigate this loss, especially as they near the independence of young adulthood? Will this sadness wreck their lives and fuel addiction, incarceration, or worse? Or will they find a way to process it that allows them to move forward in more constructive ways? Will it tear them apart and conflict their relationships with each other or will it bring them together?
The Rez Dogs’ initial dream is to move to California, to escape the depression of rural reservation life and the losses there, to run away. They run all kinds of side hustles to save money to make the trip. But what begins as a flight response is transformed into something else when Willie Jack receives an item from her teacher from a time capsule exercise they completed in school several years earlier. It is a letter, written by Daniel, to his future self as a high school senior. In his letter he shares the dream of traveling to California with the Rez Dogs. He imagines what it will be like for them to see the ocean for the first time, to see the look of wonder and awe on his friends’ faces.
Willie Jack shares the letter with her fellow Rez Dogs and they decide that they must go to California together, not to run away or to escape their life, but to honor Daniel. And that by doing so, they might somehow heal from the grief they have been experiencing.
They end up making the trip to California in Elora’s old maroon Buick sedan, which is promptly stolen, along with their stash of cash, as soon as they arrive in LA and stop at a restaurant for tacos. Through a series of comical events — including meeting and following “White Jesus,” an unhoused man dressed in a white robe who lives on Skid Row in downtown LA and who speaks with a King James Version dialect — they finally make it to the beach and witness the ocean. Willie Jack leads them in a song. Cheese says a prayer. They wade into the waves together and as they circle up for a group hug, Daniel’s embodied spirit joins them, smiling and laughing with satisfaction.
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Chaplain and bereavement specialist Dr. Teri Daniel suggests that the popular concept of “stages of grief” is much less helpful for the grieving than the “tasks of grief.” The stages of grief framework originates from the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in On Death and Dying, who initially developed the stages after interviewing dozens of people who were consciously approaching their own deaths. The stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — are not meant to suggest a linear path through grief as much as common responses people have in the midst of their grief. These stages were later applied to the experiences of those who have lost loved ones, in a book by Kübler-Ross and David Kessler entitled On Grief and Grieving.
Dr. Daniel thinks this is where the framework went off course. The stages are not meant to be prescriptive but rather descriptive. Neither are they meant to be linear but rather ad hoc and sometimes simultaneous. And yet the imagination of ‘stages’ can unhelpfully lead those who grieve to believe they are both prescriptive and linear.
Dr. Daniel suggests, instead, that those who grieve would be better off to consider the three tasks of grief: 1) recognizing the loss; 2) recollecting the life of the one who was lost; and 3) reconstructing their life on the other side of the loss. These tasks are not like items on a checklist to complete once and be done, but rather they are the ongoing, repeated work of carrying the memory and grief of loss.
Reservation Dogs is a case study in these tasks of grieving. The Rez Dogs struggle to recognize the loss of their friend Daniel. For a year they feel the empty space created by his absence. They wrestle with guilt, sadness, regret, and anger. Their trip to California is but one of the ways they recollect and honor his life. The ritual nature of their time on the beach together is a poignant experience of remembrance. Their ability to process the pain and sadness of Daniel’s death opens up space for them to reconstruct their lives together in constructive ways on the other side of the loss — to return home, to consider future education and employment opportunities, to dream new dreams.
It’s striking how similar these tasks of grief are to Judith Herman’s stages of trauma recovery: safety, remembrance, and reconnection. It makes sense — the grief of death and loss, particularly of a loved one, and the existential threat it represents, is often a traumatic experience. The whole field of trauma opened up, after all, in relation to soldiers’ experience of atrocity and death in wartime. Grief recovery and trauma recovery thus necessarily run on similar tracks. Herman’s remembrance stage is essentially the synthesis of the tasks of recognizing and recollecting. Reconnection is synonymous with reconstruction.
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Another vista of reflection opens up when considering these tasks of grief in relation to healing from religious trauma — especially in a holiday season when the sights, scents, and signals of religious experience are ubiquitous.
To heal from religious trauma is to recognize the losses in our lives. The loss of community. The loss of conviction. The loss of innocence. The loss of trust. To wrestle with the guilt, regret, anger, and sadness of that loss. To realize and believe that what happened to us was not our fault.
To heal from religious trauma is to recollect and recall those things that we lost, both the good things and harmful things. We must name and acknowledge the harmful things and tell the stories, not so we can experience the trauma again, but rather so that we can lament and grieve the harm we experienced. We can also name the good things that carry forward from our religious experience: the gifts of relationships, the positive points of impact on our character and wellbeing, experiences of hospitality and generosity. Part of the loss of grief — especially for those who have been shunned or had to walk away from religious community for their own safety — is not just recalling the harm but recalling the good and beautiful aspects of religion amid the harm.
I wonder if there is something especially instructive for the task of recollection in the ocean scene from Reservation Dogs: what are the rituals and experiences, inspired by the particularities of our loss and trauma, that we can craft and participate in to help us process the grief?
Recognition and recollection open up the space for reconstruction, to rebuild our lives on the other side of the loss and trauma, as Herman says, to become the philosophers and theologians of our own lives.
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When Willie Jack faces the prospect of a beloved elder’s death, she visits her auntie in jail to ask for advice. They sit down across a steel table in the visitation room. Willie Jack fills the table with chips, candy bars, and energy drinks from the room’s vending machines. Willie Jack wonders with her auntie how she’ll carry on. There was so much more for her to learn from her ailing elder. What will they do without this elder’s presence and wisdom in their community? Her aunt begins to assemble the snack items on the table. In the center she puts an open bag of their favorite chips — Flaming Flamers. She encircles the bag with all their other snack items. And one by one she puts a chip from the center bag on top of each snack item. This is how community works, the auntie says. She continues: the elder, represented by the chip bag at the center, has shared a part of himself — wisdom and love — with each of you that you now carry on in your relationships with others.
The tragedy of religious trauma is that we are given some rotten chips. Healing means refusing to share the rotten ones with others, to carry forward any good ones we received, and to discover other sources of nourishment for our souls that we can pass on so we can become agents of healing rather than harm.