This article contains spoilers for season 3, episode 3 of Reservation Dogs, “Deer Lady.”
Season 3, episode 3 of Reservation Dogs, “Deer Lady,” features the return of one of the most mysterious and compelling characters in the series: the eponymous Deer Lady, played by Kaniehtiio Horn (Letterkenny). Based on a vengeful spirit from Native myth and folklore, Deer Lady roams the land, violently righting old wrongs and killing bad men.
In “Deer Lady,” she meets up with Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) in a diner during his odyssey returning home from Los Angeles to Okern. Once Bear realizes who she is, he’s rightfully afraid of her—after all, if you cross paths with Deer Lady, it’s usually because you’ve committed an unforgivable crime. Deer Lady turns out to be sympathetic to Bear, though, and it seems that her task isn’t to stab him to death with an antler but to help him get home to his family. After all, she muses, he reminds her of another boy she used to know.
Interspersed with the diner scenes is a masterful, unflinching look into Deer Lady’s past. She starts off as a normal human girl, but when she’s taken to a residential school, she accepts the help of a deer spirit in order to escape.
The term “residential school” has always been intentionally misleading, evoking benign upper-class boarding schools. In reality, Indian residential schools in the U.S. and Canada were sites of endemic torture, abuse, and genocide. The purpose of residential schools wasn’t to educate Native children but to forcibly separate them from their families and communities, and strip them of their languages and cultures. Many survivors have offered accounts of the atrocities that school staff members committed; one survivor, John Jones, spoke to Boston NPR station WBUR about the horrific physical, sexual, and emotional abuse he suffered at the Alberni Residential School in British Columbia.
As the Leddy Library of the University of Windsor has documented, the remains of hundreds of murdered children have been found at former residential school sites, with the total death toll in the thousands. Children died of disease, abuse, neglect, and suicide, while more went missing during escape attempts. One single death at a school points to criminal neglect; the sheer scale of deaths at residential schools paints a clear picture of the depravity that flourished there.
And “Deer Lady” doesn’t shy away from that horror. The nuns who run the school are nothing short of monsters, rushing to assault the children at the slightest provocation. One school official, James Minor (Jon Getz), is known among the children as a murderer, and when Deer Lady’s closest friend is selected to be his next victim, the boy is dragged literally kicking and screaming to his fate.
Perhaps the most ghoulish detail in the episode is the scene in which Deer Lady finally catches up with Minor in the present day. She finds Minor fondly looking at photos of the school, reminiscing about the time he spent there. He seems to feel no remorse for what he’s done. It’s hard to say what distorted filter he’s placed over his memories of murdering children, but the scene exposes white supremacy and colonialism for the fundamental sicknesses they are.
If you’re not familiar with the history of residential schools, now’s the time to learn. And if you haven’t watched one of the most creative, complex, and engrossing series on TV yet, now’s the time to start. Reservation Dogs season 3 is currently airing on FX and Hulu.
(featured image: Shane Brown/FX)
