Reservation Dogs recap: Bear meets Deer Lady in a masterful episode

Folk tales burrow themselves into our consciousness. Like drifting dreams or stray memories, they become part of us, part of the way we understand the world around us. They’re stories we need to make sense of our lives. But they can also be, as “Deer Lady,” the third episode of this latest season of Reservation Dogs, reminds us, stories made up of lives that lack some semblance of sense.

If you were hoping to find out where Bear’s been or how he’s going to make it home after being stranded on his way to Okern from California, you may not find the answer in the first few moments of this episode. In fact, genre-wise, writer Sterlin Harjo and director Danis Goulet locate us squarely outside of the playful storytelling that so characterizes this Peabody Award-winning series. Instead, we’re plopped right into a thriller/horror tale. A nameless woman is driving across a desolate landscape. She’s stopped to head into a public restroom where she…uh, is cleaning out an animal horn of some sort—all while flashing images take us to a darkened forest that’s as foreboding as it is disorienting. Is she remembering bits of her past? Of her dreams? Of her fears? Of all of the above?

She arrives at that most American of spaces: the diner. In true Twin Peaks style, she’s there to have some pie. Cherry, yes. But also apple. Not just slices, though. She wants two full pies. The better to reminisce, which is what she’s doing as she calmly takes in the surroundings of this empty diner. Empty, that is, until Bear shows up, clearly still looking for a way to charge his phone and let his mom know not to worry. This meeting, between this laconic though not wholly (or not only) intimidating woman and Bear feels weighted with decades (if not centuries) of whispered tales about a hoofed woman men young and old should fear. Oh yeah, did we mention this wayward strange woman has hoofs for feet and makes a point of showing them to Bear, whom she recognizes and seemingly knows of?

Bear is rightly afraid. He’s heard of the Deer Woman (or Deer Lady, in this case, per the episode’s title) before. He feared she was just the kind of tale that was passed down as a way to encourage the uncles to behave: She’s known for killing men whose wrongs need to be righted. Her reputation clearly precedes her. But rather than (merely) sketching out her mythic connection with Bear in such folk terms, Reservation Dogs ties her story up with the cruel violence that afflicted Native children in residential and “training” schools through the 19th and 20th centuries. For that’s where the flashbacks that structure “Deer Lady” take us: Her origin story lies in the violence done to her as a young girl who arrived at St. Nicholas Indian Training School and, along with others, was punished to unlearn her own culture.

A young boy helped her cope with the cruelty all around her. Before he himself was taken in the middle of the night by one of the many “wolves” that helped make such an operation run smoothly, wherein Native kids were stripped of their hair, their traditions, and their sense of culture, he left her with one piece of inalienable wisdom: “Remember they can’t stop you from smiling!”

It was only after she clearly lost him to those wolves that she opted to run away in the middle of the night. It’s there where she came face to face with a deer who offered to help, with violent consequences for at least one nun involved.

Such backstory tinges her meeting with Bear with fright—especially when she offers to drive him home. She only has one stop to make. The more we learn about her time in the school (and particularly of the one young man who helped bring Native kids into the care of those ruthless nuns), the more we also begin to worry about what it is she’s going to do with the man who opens the door when she knocks.

She’s come for vengeance, and vengeance she delivers. This one wolf may have lived a full life but that didn’t keep him from dying at the hands (the horns?) of the Deer Lady who, true to her word, delivers Bear back to Okern. What Bear will take from this encounter (seeing someone come back to the car with blood all over her coat and hands must change a man, no?) is yet to be seen. But he’s now armed, at least, with a lesson he needed instilled in him: He should keep smiling, for no one can take that away from him. It feels as much a lesson for Bear as a thesis statement for Reservation Dogs, which remains an astounding piece of television quilted with such care from the kind of vast storytelling well we have all been deprived of for far too long.

Stray observations

• If you’re wondering what book Deer Lady was reading, look no further. She was engrossed in Joe Brainard’s memoir-in-snippets I Remember. The 1975 text broke new ground for its simple (though not simplistic) approach to memory: The entire book is a compilation of errant memories that together create not just the length of life but seemingly the enormity of all lived experience. (“I remember smiling at bad news. [I still do sometimes.] I can’t help it. It just comes.” “I remember the way a baby’s hand has of folding itself around your finger, as though forever.”) That focus on the minimal, on the small, feels of a piece with Reservation Dogs, which finds the transcendent in the mundane.
• I keep trying to decide if the cherry pie looked better than the apple one, or whether I’d have been just as smart as Deer Lady to not even have to decide and opt to have both.
• Let us give Kaniehtiio Horn her flowers because “Deer Lady” would not sing without the hypnotic cipher of a performance she delivers.
• The choice to make English become garbled gibberish when taken back to Deer Lady’s memories is, in keeping with the show’s cosmology, such a simple and yet effective way to alienate not its Native characters and their lived experiences but do so for the alienating world around them.
• What a gut punch of final image (“Koda Littlebird, Killed by Human Wolves”).