RYAN REDCORN: It’s very easy to intertwine our experiences and kind of press them into the page. And I think that’s what makes the show beautiful. I think that’s what makes the show honest. It’s also what makes the show funny. That seems absurd, but you can point to almost everything in the show and it directly correlates to some batshit ass crazy experience that somebody in the room had.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast, a podcast where we explore and celebrate the shows and creators that are disrupting the status quo when it comes to entertainment. I’m Gabe González, and when I hear the word disruptor, a few things come to mind. Loud, brash, impactful, and influential. So by that logic, there’s nobody more disruptive than a bunch of teens, right?
I mean, they’re using social media to mobilize for political causes, all while somehow bringing back cargo pants? There’s nothing they can’t do. And when I think about great coming of age stories about teenagers, no series comes to mind more than the Peabody award winning show, Reservation Dogs, a show that brings to life stories about native teens in a dynamic, surreal, and emotionally resonant way.
In today’s episode, Reservation Dogs writers Bobby Wilson and Ryan Redcorn talk to us about growing up Native, sharing community through art, and breaking into the TV industry right alongside your friends. We’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back to We Disrupt This Broadcast. Today we’re talking about the brutally honest and very funny show, Reservation Dogs. This understated and revolutionary series has upended the way we’re used to seeing Native people portrayed on TV. Reservation Dogs, set on an Oklahoma reservation, follows the lives of four teenagers: Bear, played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Elora, played by Devery Jacobs, Cheese, played by Lane Factor, and Willie Jack, played by Paulina Alexis, as they try to raise money to make it off the reservation and head to California. All of this as they grieve the death of their friend. Today, we’re talking to two very talented writers on the series, Ryan Redcorn and Bobby Wilson. Also, a content note, this interview includes a discussion of suicide in the Native community.
Bobby and Ryan, thank you both for being here to chat about yourselves, about your work, and of course, to show Reservation Dogs created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. Bobby, one of the things I find most captivating about the show is that the protagonists are teenagers and they’re so honest and unfiltered and intense the way teenagers are, even with low stakes issues, right?
BOBBY WILSON: Well, you know, I’ll say it was Sterlin’s idea to do that. And I always thought that it was such a great choice, and thinking about the type of movies that we grew up watching, which did center youth, I mean, it gives you so much room for hijinks. As a collective, the entire writer’s room have been able to really explore our own pasts as being misunderstood and misguided little shits, you know, all from pretty much like poor communities, you know.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It seems like you’re in kind of a non-traditional idyllic writer’s room, right? By that I mean, you’re encouraged to bring your lived experiences into work and your whole writer’s room is Native.
BOBBY WILSON: In the last three years, we’ve gone from having two Indians in Hollywood to like 10, which is amazing. Our numbers are up, baby!
RYAN REDCORN: Yeah, I think this show by itself doubled the amount of Indians in the WGA.
BOBBY WILSON: Yeah, that was a crazy WGA meeting.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So what we need is for non-Native folks to, not focus so much on fractions and focus more on multiplication is what I’m hearing. We need to multiply that number in the coming years.
RYAN REDCORN: I see what you did there.
BOBBY WILSON: Speaking of bookends, huh?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We’re going to bring it all together. We’re going to bring it all together.
RYAN REDCORN: Gabe the mathlete. Mathlete Gabe.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So, I’d like to know more about how these teenage storylines come together in the writer’s room. Could you tell us a bit about that process, Ryan?
RYAN REDCORN: Sterlin always says, like, you just have to tell the truth, and like, it’s all a reflection of the people that’s in that writer’s room. And like, the places that we all grew up have been subjected to a lot of the same experiences, both on a local regional level and also on a federal level. And that creates a lot of shared experience regardless of like what part of the country that you’re in. It’s very easy to intertwine our experiences and kind of press them into the page.
And I think that’s what makes the show beautiful. I think that’s what makes the show honest. It’s also what makes the show funny. It seems absurd, but you can point to almost everything in the show, and it directly correlates to some batshit ass crazy experience that somebody in the room had.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And something that I love is that the show doesn’t really do cultural explaining. It’s very much, if you know, you know. Like, to me, one of my favorite running motifs in the show is a censoring of the owls.
CLIP: Aw, fuck. Hell nah, not an owl! Oh my god! Yo, that’s not a good sign. Oh my god. God damn. Yeah, no. I think I might have a heart attack. I told you we shouldn’t have came here, man.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And it’s not a joke I understood, but it’s one of those moments where I was like, I want to Google what this is about and understand, you know what I mean? It’s like, I appreciated a show not explaining something to me being like, Hey, this is written by us and it’s a joke for us. You can enjoy it the way you’re seeing it, or you can learn more. And I’m curious, did you all have early conversations at any point surrounding these sort of in community jokes or running motifs? Ryan, let’s start with you.
RYAN REDCORN: I think we’re all like, we have a shared annoyance for Indian-splaining.
BOBBY WILSON: Shit yeah.
RYAN REDCORN: There’s also like the innate voyeuristic nature of the rest of the country, like wanting to know all this stuff that, I don’t know, really none of their business. And it’s not even going to add to their lives if they do know, but it’s like this weird thing where people feel like they have the right to know. And we just give them like, this is how you would experience a story if you were in the community, like the way that I think a lot of us in the community, we’re educated as like, even as a kid, you don’t know. You just sit there and you sit there long enough and you just observe it and that’s how, you know, that’s how you learn. And that’s even like, even that way of learning is exhibited inside the show. And it’s joked about because like, sometimes it works really well and sometimes it doesn’t, but you have like a multitude of experiences that can collectively let you arrive at the idea on your own, and then it becomes yours in a way that is not this top down way of learning or teaching.
CLIP: Well, how do we start? Just sit there. Don’t ask questions. And when the time is right, I’ll let you know…
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So Ryan and Bobby, y’all have been satirizing media portrayals of Native folks even before Reservation Dogs existed. I’d love to talk about your all native sketch comedy group, The 1491s. Can you tell us about the very first sketch that you all made together?
RYAN REDCORN: Are you talking about the Wolfpack auditions?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yes! That is, that is the one. Yes, please.
RYAN REDCORN: So, the Wolfpack audition video was filmed during the opening weekend of Twilight. And none of us bothered to go see it. We had already seen so many films with Indians in it that were not directed by Indians, written by Indians, produced by Indians, edited by Indians. Pretty much we were just like the window paint after everything’s already been decided.
BOBBY WILSON: Very sexy window paint.
RYAN REDCORN: The sexiest shirtless window paint that you could find.
BOBBY WILSON: No tan lines, nothing.
RYAN REDCORN: So the premise of the video is just a bunch of like regular community folks trying out for this major Hollywood film. I think I ended up like actually videotaping three or four auditions for other people in my own community for that only to turn around and do that.
CLIP: First up, we would like you to actually do your sort of Indian stuff. Uh, right? Yeah. Cultural stuff. Uh, anything. Dancing? You guys dance? Ah! Ah! Oh yeah. Oh! Oh!
RYAN REDCORN: There’s a lot of Native content that is super earnest, hyper earnest, and hyper depressing, or maybe even both at the same time. And that’s not really how the community exists. Not in my experience. I remember driving back after that video. It’s a 12 hour drive back to Oklahoma, and we just talked about how we felt like we were on drugs still a whole day after because just the joy of all of that like being in your bones. It was like you knew that something special had happened and it did.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely, it’s a great sketch, great satire, especially the way it sort of sends up Hollywood portrayals of Native people. And I wanted to point it out here because it does seem like such an important connection to the work that you all ended up doing on Reservation Dogs.
BOBBY WILSON: Well, thanks for pointing it out, because, uh, it was a really beautiful memory getting us together in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was all just, like, super cool, frickin getting homies together, and, like, we had barely knew each other when we made that video. And just found, uh, found our senses of humor aligned pretty perfectly in that instance, and we just wanted to keep on doing it. And everywhere we went, we became what we love to call Indian famous. Every res, every community where there were Indian people, every dude with two braids in an airport giving us the head nod, they recognized that video. Nobody else, you know. White people were like the last ones to get on board, but thank goodness they did, you know. Cause here we are.
RYAN REDCORN: Yeah. Where would we be with all these white people who believe that they’re like one 64th something that would not otherwise have come out so that they can, you know, bolster and solidify their identity for the rest of their lives. And you know, what a legacy they will be able to pass on to their kids who will be truly pleased. One three hundred and sixty fifth something.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: All it takes is a mastery of fractions and then seeing your sketch and suddenly the doors are open.
BOBBY WILSON: A mastery of fractions.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: A mastery of fractions. Yes. Suddenly everyone’s good at math when it comes to native issues. I’m sure yeah. I love that. So Bobby earlier you all mentioned when you first made the sketch you barely knew each other and I think you know Since that first sketch members of the 1491s have gone on to write for Reservation Dogs which we’re talking about today as well as Rutherford Falls and you know, so much, I’m sure, has changed from the moment you made that sketch until the moment these shows came out.
BOBBY WILSON: Well, there’s a few different ways. I mean, everything’s connected. And really, Indians, you know, we’re in deficit when it comes to the degree of separation that each of us have. You know, that’s not even one degree. It’s like negative four degrees of separation. And so, I met Redcorn and Sterling at the Santa Fe Indian Market. We spent the whole freaking day together and then we went to like a really amazing concert at a VFW where I got to see Samantha Crane for the first time, whose music really features heavily in Reservation Dogs. And so I was totally bugging out with all of this amazing indigenous artwork. It felt like this huge piece of history that I got to be a part of.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So, I’d like to transition a bit and talk about how marginalized communities might find humor in unexpected places. For example, the way humor is used to deal with a lack of resources or to critique oppressive circumstances. Has that been your experience, Ryan?
RYAN REDCORN: The ability to do that in the face of everything else, like, is the power.
You can take away the land, you can take away resources, you can take away all this stuff, but you won’t be able to take away our ability to laugh at you. Or laugh at each other. And that is at the core of, I think, our community spirit.
CLIP: Go with your uncles. They’ll take good care of you. How long you been in that room? Whole week? I don’t know. What day is it? Friday. Shit. Time flies when you’re fighting zombies. You guys want to try it? Uh uh. Nah, young’un, we fight real zombies, not fake ones on TV. What kind of zombies do you guys fight? Ones you can’t see. The guilt in your hearts? Hey. No. Society. Racists. Bad guys. Mainstream science. Yeah. The man. Then what are you guys doing here? We’re on a mission. Operation Nephew Rescue. Oh! Hop in. Oh.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So, Bobby, I’m curious, who are some of the elders or family members who’ve helped shape your perspective?
BOBBY WILSON: I mean, like, all of my uncles who were either in Vietnam or fuckin came out of heavy addictions. The darkest fucking shit that you can imagine a human being going through, and just like the most thunderous laughs as well. You know, some of the most lit funerals we’ve ever been to were Indian funerals, you know. They’re not somber occasions. My uncle Louie Foot died, and they wheeled his casket into the gymnasium of the Minneapolis Indian Center, and then all of his homies went to his apartment and grabbed his furniture, his rug and like, set it all up around his casket. And for like four days, you could just go in there and sing, or tell stories, or talk shit, or whatever it was. And it was really one of the more beautiful public events I’ve ever been to, you know? I can’t point to like, one person. I mean, I grew up around powwow emcees. You know, and these fools are like, you know, part of their job is to just roast fools everywhere.
RYAN REDCORN: Yeah. Bobby’s spot on with these guys in our communities, the older men. These is like a steady stream of men in my community who were children during some of the darkest times in our community’s history back in the twenties and thirties. And I knew these men when they were in their seventies, eighties and nineties when I was a kid. And like Bobby said, they would just sit up there and they would roast. They would roast our own people that they knew. They would roast our people that had like gone away and didn’t know anything and they were coming back. And, you know, that type of joy that they brought to those events, like people are there, when people come together like that, they do that fundamentally because there’s something there that they find joy in.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, that makes me think of how you all handle tragedy and comedy within Reservation Dogs. The series in part revolves around the death of the group’s friend Daniel, and early on it’s revealed that he died by suicide. Bobby, why was it important for you to tell that story alongside the comedic plotlines?
BOBBY WILSON: We all have a Daniel, some of us more than one. The prevalence of that darkness and what leads a person to end their own life is so stacked against us. Native men are the most likely people in this country to end their own lives. And that is a pervasive and dark spirit that hovers over us in all of our communities. And oftentimes in our travels as the 1491s going to these communities, we would get invited with the warning that there has been an outbreak of suicides in the community for young people, specifically. And that’s fucked, man.
But like, we understand, you know. I mean, look at this world that is stacked against us. When we grow up in our communities, we’re told about these almost, these like, fantasy utopian stories about our people before whites showed up and built fucking Starbucks and Targets over us. And like the juxtaposition of that going to like public schools and like going to court and dealing with all of these terrible systems that we have no control over.
Like, yeah, of course it happens. It’s like, what world are we living in, you know? It’s hard to deal with it sometimes. I struggle with it myself, you know? And with that, telling that story in the show is our, like, equal opposite balance. When we talk about what is Native humor, that is Native humor. We come in as the equal opposite balancing force against that darkness.
I don’t have the fucking statistic, but we all have seen that and experienced that. And the fight against it is the joke, you know. And Daniel, the love, the life and the darkness all exist within all of us. And so that’s, to me, what makes that so important to have that story in there. And how do we deal with that.
RYAN REDCORN: You can’t deny the darkness. You can’t talk around it. You can’t negotiate with it. We have tools and mechanisms available to us culturally that give us an avenue for laughter. And I just utilize that. And we did that going into those communities. I mean, like, that’s why that humor plays because we’re basically doing the same thing, you know, through our shows and just reminding people that there is joy, there is laughter, there is love.
Like we can acknowledge this darker side. We have to, if we don’t acknowledge it, then it will. It will eat you alive, but I love making comedy with these guys because we all understand that we’re perfectly happy dedicating our entire lives to making people laugh. I mean, even if it means if just like one more person gets to stay, we will do that, you know? So it’s just beautiful and I’m happy to even like have the opportunity to be able to live like that. It’s just, it’s a blessing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, that’s both very beautiful and very difficult to hear, right? But you can feel that sentiment and see it so much in the work you both do. So thank you for unpacking that with us here and also for your ability to communicate these feelings so beautifully effectively and incredibly on screen
CLIP: We didn’t get to say goodbye to you Daniel and um You know what to be honest I’ve been kind of mad at you. You’re my hero man. Now you’re not here to make things right or better. Willie Jack, she cares for her family members, and now she’s lost her brother, cousin, friend. And Bear, he lost his best friend. Now a piece of him’s missing. And Elora, she lost her hope. Whenever she looked to the future she’d see you there, man. You’re our brother. We remember you for all the good things we’ve done together. And we’re out here for you, man. We just hope we’re doing the right thing.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So Ryan, earlier you mentioned some of the cultural tools or mechanisms that give communities an avenue for laughter. And I’m curious how bringing that kind of cultural specificity to a show like Reservation Dogs can reverberate outside of the industry. So thinking specifically about your community, what kind of impact do you think seeing accurate cultural representation has had on young Native people?
RYAN REDCORN: We won’t be able to fully answer that question until years from now. And I think for stories and productions going forward, there’s going to be before Reservation Dogs and there’s going to be after.
BOBBY WILSON: Yeah, it’s true, man. But like, in the immediate space, it’s been absolutely incredible, you know, to see how Indian people respond to this, identify with it, and really find this sense of belonging and love in it. I watched this episode with my daughter, this beautiful brown baby girl dragging a frickin boombox and she says, that’s mom! And you know, the kid does look a lot like her mom, which doesn’t happen on TV. And her grandma is literally a background extra in the dance scene. And watching that whole episode with her, every time she saw somebody that was her relative or looked like her relative she screamed at the top of her lungs with joy and was dancing along, and I was just, I fucking cried like a little goddamn, baby. Cause it really, you know, like you, you do the work and you’re there and you can feel it. But like watching that really put me in a space of like, holy shit, like this is real. This is normal for her now. And it’s not something that I got to experience when I was a kid.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. That is wonderful. I love to hear it. And on that note, Bobby and Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today.
That was Bobby Wilson and Ryan Redcorn, writers for Reservation Dogs. I want to thank them so much for joining us and offering a little perspective into how a show like Reservation Dogs reached our screens, what it took to get there, and why it resonates with us. I also just had a lot of fun talking to them. That was great. Stick around because when we get back, we’ll interview Dr. Philip Deloria, a professor of Native History at Harvard University, who’s going to provide a little context into why Reservation Dogs is such a game changer.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back to We Disrupt This Broadcast. In today’s episode, we’ve been talking about the critically acclaimed show Reservation Dogs. Here to keep the conversation going is professor of history at Harvard University, whose focus is the social, cultural, and political histories of American Indians in the United States. Please welcome Professor Philip Deloria. Hi there.
PHILIP DELORIA: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: As someone who has a deep knowledge about Native history and representation in this country, what was your first thought when watching the show?
PHILIP DELORIA: Oh, my first thought was. Thank God. It’s, it was, you know, brilliant from day one and full of this kind of richness that like you could perceive native stuff happening, right? You know, it was beautiful. It was fantastic.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. I think part of that richness comes from the writing team and stars of the series who bring their own lived experiences to the show and manage to find a very specific humor rooted in their culture. It seems like historically, TV and film has been missing that richness, specifically when it comes to telling Native stories. What does Native representation in media look like historically and why?
PHILIP DELORIA: Well, you know, it’s not been so great, right? You know, for hundreds of years. And I mean, right, it goes with the whole project of settlement and colonization and conquest and violence, right? All of those things. So, you know, it’s been the usual tropes, right? They’re savage. They’re primitive. They’re not very smart. They can’t interact in a capitalist economy. You know, all of these kind of negative representations, they can’t handle their alcohol, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s the repulsion part. But there’s also been this desire part, which is like, Oh, they’re super spiritual, you know, aren’t they?
They’re really authentic. They’re really close to nature, right? So there’ve been these forms of representation that are quote unquote positive, but which are just as distancing as the others. And the effect of it is that Native folks don’t ever get to live within representation as complicated historical human beings. And that’s one of the things that Reservation Dogs does so well, is it actually lets Native folks be Native and human at the same time.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So Dr. Deloria, can you tell us a little bit about what makes Native humor in particular so unique?
PHILIP DELORIA: The humor of oppressed peoples emerges out of their historical conditions, right? It’s not that like, Oh, it’s funny. These situations are funny. It’s that these situations are ironic. And I think like naming irony as the consequence of things like colonialism or enslavement or other forms of oppression, right? Because what is irony fundamentally? It’s like, well, I got a picture of what the world looks like. I hear people talk about certain things, freedom, liberty, those sorts of things, but that’s not the real conditions of life.
And to sort of live within that, to understand that like what is said to you is not what is being done to you, is the fundamental condition of irony, that contradiction. It’s like, if I can perceive the contradiction in this circumstance, I can actually speak to it, and a lot of times what I will speak with is a kind of life affirming recognition of the irony of the situation that will become funny, right? But I think it reaches for something that’s higher than just the joke. It’s reaching for something, you know, that is deeper. And I think that’s kind of the nature of Native humor. And I think the nature of humor of many, many peoples who are using humor to cope with situations.
CLIP: Aho! Young warrior. Are you Crazy Horse or Sitting… No, no, no. I’m not one of those awesome guys, no. I’m more of your, uh, I’m more of your unknown warrior. Yeah. You know my name? Yeah. William Knife Man. I was at the battle of Little Bighorn. That’s right. I didn’t kill anybody. But I fought bravely. Well, I didn’t actually fight. I actually didn’t even get into the fight itself. But I came over that hill real rugged like, I saw Custer like that. That yellow hair. He was sitting there. Son of the Morning Star. That guy right there. Fuck. I really hated him. So I went after him. But then the damn horse hit a gopher hole, fucking rolled over and squashed me. I died there.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I think a lot of oppressed communities use that dark and sometimes painful humor as a way to teach too. So I’m curious, can you tell us a bit about how indigenous communities use humor as what we might call a governance strategy?
PHILIP DELORIA: Yeah, that’s a great question. The Dakota Lakota culture, you know, kind of tradition. I mean, how does governance work? It’s a social practice, right? And it’s, you know, about like shaming people a little bit, but you don’t want to shame someone too much. So you shame them just enough and how you do that through teasing, you know? So my grandfather was a very famous tease, you know, he teased all the time. But that teasing was ways of doing social governance around a group. And I think there’s a lot of overlaps to different kinds of communities, right where the gentle teasing of an aunt or an uncle is going to be the thing that keeps you in line, right?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, thank you so much, Phil, for joining us today and providing a little context and insight. We really appreciate it.
PHILIP DELORIA:It’s been great. Thanks for the conversation.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Today’s conversations have been so much fun and so insightful. Bobby and Ryan have a way of bringing their full selves and past experiences into their work that feels so dynamic. It is wild to me, but not entirely surprising, that Bobby and Ryan had been doing comedy together for years, grinding away and making brilliant satire before Reservation Dogs brought their sense of humor to TV, with the kind of incisive and authentic storytelling they had spent years honing. It’s a reminder of how often the industry shows up late to the party.
Dr. Philip Deloria’s explanation of irony as a response to, and a critique of, injustice punctuated why Reservation Dogs not only exists in a legacy of Native humor, but is expanding upon that legacy today. Maybe one of the most exciting things was hearing Bobby and Ryan talk about their own kids, how their kids aren’t just seeing a different reality represented on screen, they’re living a different reality than Bobby and Ryan did. And their parents are getting to be a part of creating that representation.
Thanks again for joining us on We Disrupt This Broadcast, and if you haven’t yet, you can watch all three seasons of Reservation Dogs now.
The Peabody Awards are decided unanimously, so to close out our episode, I bring you We Disrupt This Broadcast‘s unanimous decision, where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day.
BOBBY WILSON: Yeah, that was a crazy WGA meeting.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Next time on We Disrupt This Broadcast, we’re talking with Somebody Somewhere actors Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller.
JEFF HILLER: I remember one time I was pitching something, and my manager was like, you gotta have somebody young in this show. These people are all old. And I was like, they’re just 40. And so I think it’s rare to see that your life can still be a life post 40 and God forbid, post 50. You know.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: we’re talking about why there is no time limit on achieving your dreams or making friends. And how, yes, queer people do exist in small towns.
We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production, hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Joyelle Nicole Johnson. This show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer, Jordana Jason. Writers, Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin-Armstrong. Associate producer: Bella Green. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Drayer and Tunisia Singleton. From PRX, the team is: Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Morgan Church, Edwin Ochoa, and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.