Standing strong

Shows that showcase the resilience of Indigenous communities

What TV shows are dominating the conversation, capturing the zeitgeist, have something interesting to say, or are hidden gems waiting to be uncovered or rediscovered? We take a look ahead of your weekend watch. And, be warned, there are spoilers ahead.

As a TV critic, my main criterion for whether I like a TV show is a pretty simple one: Does it make me feel something?

The answer in the case of “Reservation Dogs” is a resounding yes, and part of the appeal of this Hulu comedy drama is how those feelings sneak up on you; laughter can turn to tears and back again on a dime.

In fact, the show generally confounds expectations, in a good way.

When we first meet the “Reservation Dogs” of the title — friends Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Pauline Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) — they’re stealing a delivery truck full of chips. This is no expert heist. The quartet speed away, the truck’s loading ramp dragging and sparking, right past the local cop who, luckily, is too absorbed in a video about the Kennedy assassination on his phone to notice.

The website IMDb.com calls “Reservation Dogs” a “crime” comedy, which is as laughably wrongheaded as calling its core foursome criminals. They’re really four bored, questing teenagers who are quixotically planning to leave their Oklahoma reservation for California in honour of a dead friend, using the truck theft and other schemes to fund the trip.

Over the show’s three seasons — the third and final one is now streaming on Disney Plus Star — the teens work through their grief, their fear, their uncertainty; sometimes together, sometimes apart.

There are no pat resolutions and the dark stuff — suicide, racism, memories of residential school — sits cheek by jowl with laugh-outloud humour.

And it’s not just the young ones who command our attention. Their fictional community of Okern is full of gloriously idiosyncratic characters who contribute to the richly layered tapestry of this show. Not all of them are alive.

Take William Knifehorn (Dallas Goldtooth), a spirit who almost fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn, except his horse stumbled on a gopher hole and fell on him. He frequently appears to advise Bear.

Some episodes focus on these secondary characters, whether it’s tribal police officer Big (Zahn McClarnon) stumbling into the woods on an (accidental) psychedelic drug trip, uncovering both a white supremacist cult and his buried guilt over a decades-old death; or Maximus (Graham Greene), an estranged elder who’s off his meds and fixated on alien “star people,” taking a lost Bear under his wing.

Such episodes might seem like diversions, but they connect in interesting and enlightening ways to the story of our four youthful heroes.

You might notice that a lot of the faces in this majority Indigenous production hail from the Canadian side of the border, including Woon-A-Tai, Jacobs and Alexis; sisters Sarah, Tamara and Jennifer Podemski; Gary Farmer; Kaniehtiio Horn and the aforementioned Greene.

The series was created by Sterlin Harjo, who grew up in Oklahoma and is of Seminole Nation and Muskogee heritage, and Oscar winner Taika Waititi, who’s of New Zealand Maori heritage. But its appeal transcends borders and cultures.

Oh, and do the Reservation Dogs ever get to California? If you’ve watched the second season, you know that they do, and it’s both exhilarating and disappointing.

Home, it turns out, isn’t so bad after all. This final season beautifully reinforces the bonds of community, the one thing the colonizers couldn’t take from the Indigenous despite their best efforts. Stream on Disney Plus Star.

Because Saturday is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation here in Canada, I’ve highlighted a few others series with an Indigenous focus that I’ve enjoyed.

Little Bird

Extensive research went into this six-part series created by Ojibwe writer and producer Jennifer Podemski and Jewish playwright Hannah Moscovitch, and it shows in the depth and breadth of the story.

Most importantly, it puts an all too human, relatable face on what’s known as the Sixties Scoop, when thousands upon thousands of First Nation, Métis and Inuit children were taken from their families.

The series begins in the 1960s with an ordinary, happy day for a closeknit family of six on a reserve in Saskatchewan, a family that’s destroyed when three of the children are forcibly removed by police and child services.

Bezhig (Darla Contois) appears to be the lucky one: adopted by a caring Jewish family, educated to be a lawyer, engaged to be married. But a racist remark by her future motherin-law reopens wounds and sends her searching for her birth family.

That search is touching, heartbreaking and ultimately healing for Bezhig, and worth following for us. Stream on Crave.

Bones of Crows

This five-part series created by Métis and Dene writer and director Marie Clements likewise mines a dark part of Canada’s past.

It traces the effects of residential school on several generations of a Cree family from Manitoba, chiefly through the experiences of its matriarch, Aline Spears (Grace Dove). We follow her from the 1930s when her parents are coerced into sending her and her three siblings to residential school, through the early 2000s when her descendants are beginning to thrive.

The series connects the systemic dots between the various ills Canada’s Indigenous Peoples have suffered from colonization, going as far back as the 1860s when First Nations were starved off their land to make way for white settlement.

But, as with “Little Bird,” the point of the show isn’t just to embody Indigenous pain, although that’s part of it, but to showcase the resilience of the Indigenous communities that are still with us today. Stream on CBC Gem and APTN lumi.

Dark Winds

If you have watched TV and movies in the last four decades, you have seen Zahn McClarnon in various supporting roles, whether as a stereotypical Native American on “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” a stealthy criminal enforcer on “Fargo” or a sentient android “host” in “Westworld.” The Lakota actor finally gets a well-deserved lead role as Joe Leaphorn, a Navajo tribal police detective, in this crime drama set in the 1970s.

Joe doggedly solves murders alongside fellow cops Bernadette Manuelito (Canadian Métis actor Jessica Matten) and Jim Chee (Hualapai actor Kiowa Gordon).

Part of the beauty of this entertaining show, which has just been renewed for a third season, is that despite being steeped in Navajo tradition and culture, it’s not just an Indigenous story; it’s a gripping mystery series that happens to have Indigenous characters. Stream on AMC Plus.

Trickster

There are no pat resolutions in ‘Reservation Dogs’ and the dark stuff — suicide, racism, memories of residential school — sits cheek by jowl with laugh-outloud humour

This 2020 series was a promising start to what was meant to be a multi-season adaptation of the award-winning “Trickster” novels of Eden Robinson. It was unfortunately cut short by allegations that creator Michelle Latimer had misrepresented her Indigenous heritage.

You can still watch the six episodes that exist, in which Joel Oulette, then a neophyte Red River Métis and Swampy Cree actor, plays a teenager who learns unsettling truths about his parentage. Jared has to add dealing with supernatural creatures to more mundane concerns like school, divorced parents, asking out the girl he likes and getting to his part-time job.

I haven’t seen the show for a while, but in a review I wrote back then I said, “Indigenous viewers might appreciate seeing their stories reflected onscreen while non-Indigenous ones might learn something; in both cases, they can expect to be entertained.” Stream on CBC Gem.

Keep in mind there are a number of non-fiction programs airing Saturday that explore the Indigenous experience in this country, including docuseries “Telling Our Story”

(CBC TV, 8 p.m.); the documentary “True Story, Part Two” (History, 9 p.m.) and the live gathering “Remembering the Children: National

Day for Truth and Reconciliation 2023” (APTN, 1 p.m.).