‘Reservation Dogs’ Delivers Deer Lady’s Dark Origin Story & an Important History Lesson

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Reservation Dogs Season 3 Episode 3 “Deer Lady.”]

Reservation Dogs takes a dark turn in the latest installment, “Deer Lady,” which sees the origin story of the titular mythological figure, portrayed in the series by Kaniehtiio Horn.

Punishing men who do wrong, she runs into Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), who had been stranded after missing his bus in the premiere. Alarmed upon learning whom he’s crossed paths with, Deer Lady assures him that she’s not out to harm him and offers the young man a ride back to the reservation (after a few servings of diner pie), with a pit stop along the way.

Her journey has a dark history, which unfolds in a series of flashbacks upon her arrival at one of the boarding schools responsible for stripping Indigenous youth of their language. In this case, it’s also considered a house of horrors as she and her fellow students are abused by the nuns and men in charge, individuals Deer Lady calls “human wolves.” One night when her best friend, Koda (Michael Podemski-Bedard), is pulled from his bed and killed, she runs for her life and encounters a deer who speaks to her, offering aid, essentially leading to her spiritual transformation.

(Credit: Shane Brown/FX)

Half of the episode plays out like a horror movie with the adults running the boarding school speaking in unintelligible gibberish to mimic what Indigenous children would have experienced in that circumstance. The episode toes the line between illustrating the depths of these horrors without ever having to show just how bad it really was. “That’s the trickiest balance, like walking a tightrope,” director Danis Goulet tells TV Insider. “It was something that I was thinking about through every choice being made… If you go too far, I don’t think people are able to take it in, but if you don’t put enough out there, you’re not really being truthful.”

In order to capture the authenticity of the stories being told, Goulet says, “we worked with this amazing consultant, [Denise Lajimodiere], who wrote a book, [Stringing Rosaries], about the boarding schools. She was an incredible help and her book talks about the horrors of what happened in the boarding schools.”

(Credit: Shane Brown/FX)

It’s not a chapter of American history that’s often displayed onscreen, and so Goulet wanted to convey the seriousness of the situation. “This is a much more sinister way of enacting warfare on a people — to go after their children — and for this to not be known in the public consciousness, that children were taken from their parents by law to assimilate them and eradicate the culture… it inflicted a profound amount of damage.”

That kind of damage is reflected in the lack of native and fluent speakers of the Indigenous languages across North America. In this case, the episode looks to Kiowa, which is spoken onscreen by the young version of Deer Lady (Georgeanne Growingthunder) and Koda, along with the other children at the boarding school.

In order to play those scenes as scripted, Podemski-Bedard and Growingthunder had to learn the language, which was taught to them with the help of Kiowa language consultant, Warren C. Queton. “We only have a handful of speakers left,” he tells us. “Maybe less than 10 to 20 [native] speakers. But to hear it on this TV show, I hope it inspires people to learn their language — not only Kiowa but other tribes.”

(Credit: Shane Brown/FX)

While training the actors, Queton says, “We had a couple of Zoom meetings of walking through the different sounds because our language is much different than what they’ve spoken before, but because they’re children, they can pick things up easier. I felt like working with Mike and Georgeanne, they were able to play with that. And then we gave them the lines and then told them to practice. ”

Queton says after their initial lesson, he asked the young actors to speak the lines aloud and they’d work on fine-tuning the sounds as they went along. “They were really receptive to that, but we kind of had to be focused on mentorship. I think people got discouraged to speak the language because elders would say, ‘You’re not saying that right,'” Queton notes.

“I think Zoom kind of helped take away some of that intimidation because you could turn off your screen and just listen to the person talk if you wanted to. You didn’t have to see their face. And I think that helped with teaching them.”

It was important for the kids to speak Kiowa as well because of the way Goulet and the team wanted to capture English speakers in those flashback sequences. “To have the children have to learn Kiowa was a real challenge, and they just did such a beautiful job,” Goulet remarks. “I remember when the first take happened, I just was crying because they sounded so beautiful and I couldn’t believe what they were doing. To even depict the language onscreen means so much to so many people.”

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The gibberish delivered by the English speakers was that much more terrifying and, as Goulet says, “written into the script… That’s Sterlin’s brilliant take on really showing the POV of the children who don’t understand English, so it’s not going to sound like English to them,” she says of series creator and episode writer Sterlin Harjo. “It functions in a horror container because it sounds scary, it’s kind of strange. It’s otherworldly. It’s disturbing.”

As for the preservation of the Kiowa language now, Queton says, “We have had a long journey of getting [a language program] established. There has never been a language program within our tribe ’til this past year when our legislature worked with our executive branch to put funding for a program into our tribal budget. We’re at the precipice where we need to make change happen.” It’s an episode of television like this that continues to push the efforts of preservation forward.

And in pushing forward, Deer Lady also finds some solace in avenging her old friend by killing the man responsible for his death before the episode’s end, giving viewers a better picture of Reservation Dogs‘ version of the character Goulet was excited to help direct. “I was absolutely thrilled when I read the episode and knew that I would be working on not only Deer Lady, ’cause she’s such a badass character, but also Kaniehtiio Horn, who is an incredible actor.”

“When you watch her do a take, she can go between fierce and funny and vulnerable and all the things you hope for. After that first day at the diner, I just thought, ‘Oh my god, Deer Lady needs her own series.'” We’d order that just as quickly as Deer Lady orders pies.

FX’s Reservation Dogs, Season 3, Wednesdays, Hulu