How 'Reservation Dogs' Changed the TV Landscape

Reservation Dogs was an act of cultural reclamation. The series broadly followed the coming-of-age stories of four Indigenous teenagers in Okern, Okla.—a fictional stand-in for the city of Okmulgee—but it also shouldered the burden of rewriting on-screen depictions of Native people. It was the first TV show to feature exclusively Indigenous writers and directors, as well as a mostly Indigenous crew, and to be shot almost entirely on location in Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma. The cast was primarily a mix of young, relatively unknown actors and recognizable elder statesmen like Wes Studi and Gary Farmer, as a pointed illustration of the breadth of Native talent ignored or underrecognized by casting directors.