Xochitl Salinas, a Clinical Social Work Intern (CSWI) and a Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW), recently graduated from the School of Social Work. She is a member of the Yurok Tribe and a descendant of the Pit River Tribe and has always been very connected to her Native American heritage with her community as the driving force throughout her life.

Growing up, Salinas was in the foster care system and was assigned an Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) coordinator through her tribe who Salinas credits with having a major positive impact on her life. The ICWA is a federal bill that was put in place to protect Indigenous foster youth by making sure the youth is placed with a family member or a family within the tribe to preserve their culture and traditions while they are in the system. From an early age, Salinas aspired to be like her coordinator, but after witnessing the various ways in which social workers can make a difference in people’s lives, she decided to become a therapist.

“I was passionate about the ICWA and about my social worker coordinator who followed me through the process,” Salinas said. “When I finally had the opportunity to go back to school, I realized that you could do a lot within social work. I’m still passionate about ICWA and working with Indigenous youth, but now I’m a CSWI and I’m focused on practicing therapy.”

While obtaining her master’s degree, Salinas had the opportunity to lead a Q and A with the president of the University, Brian Sandoval, during Social Work Legislative Day. While she asked him about how legislative bills have various impacts on the student body and how social work students can more get involved, Salinas also wanted an update on the growing number of Indigenous students on campus. She wanted to raise awareness of how the University supports these students and how Indigenous students can continue to make a difference not only at the University but in legislation as well.

During her time on campus as an undergraduate student, Salinas was involved in a social action club called Fused, which brought awareness to social justice issues that impacted students. The club would also organize events and fundraisers for various causes.

“I wanted to do something cool for Native American Heritage Month so, using some of the funds from Fused, I connected with a local artist and raised money for a local Indigenous cause called ‘River Justice,’” Salinas said. “We created an art display with work from different Indigenous artists at the Potentialist during November.”

Giving back to Native students is close to Salinas’ heart. A program on campus held in the summer was a perfect opportunity for her to connect to Native youth and help inspire them to pursue higher education. The program is called Native LEAD, which stands for Learn, Empower, Achieve and Dream, at the University of Nevada, Reno. During the program, Indigenous high school students live in the residence halls on campus for a week and experience college life and coursework. They have an opportunity to connect with the culture and cultural support systems at the University. The Office of Indigenous Relations runs this program and Salinas volunteered to participate by running a workshop.

“I was asked if I wanted to present a wellness activity with the Indigenous youth staying on campus,” Salinas said. “I worked with the kids going through each letter of the TIPP DBT distress tolerance skill: temperature change, intense exercise, pace breathing and progressive muscle relaxation. I explained to the students that they can use these skills when they become distressed or have big emotions. By practicing the TIPP skill we can bring ourselves back to baseline. I was excited to do it and if the program happens again I’d be more than happy to come back and do another wellness activity with the students.”

Salinas is currently working with a wide range of clients and loves being able to connect with every one of them. She meets with people struggling with anything from depression and anxiety to relationship or career challenges. Salinas’ early introduction to social work showed her all the good that social work can do. Although she didn’t become an ICWA coordinator as she initially envisioned, she finds great fulfillment in her current role helping individuals and making a meaningful difference in their lives, and volunteering with Native youth.

How was Occom able to rise to such a level of fame in his time? What was so singular about him?

Occom was brought up in a community that valued strangers. Interacting with people from outside the community was a way of acknowledging the world’s sacredness. In my book, I discuss how this helps explain why Occom excelled at talking to so many different kinds of people: This ability was a deeply rooted cultural competence.

I also suspect that Occom was hugely charismatic. In the 1760s, he did a preaching tour in England. If you look at the Samson Occom Papers at the Connecticut Historical Society, you can read fan letters in which English people write about the power of his preaching, and how overwhelmed they were by his sheer physical presence. Of course, Occom’s celebrity was overdetermined in some sense. After all, he was the first Indigenous person to be ordained as a Protestant minister. For 18th-century evangelicals, this had biblical significance. A few of them described Occom’s ministry as a turning point in world history.

Was there anything you learned during the research and writing of this book that surprised you, or was unexpected?

I know a lot about Samson Occom now. As much as I can know, or almost. But I also learned, from talking to members of his communities, that there are people who know and value Occom in a way I never will: Those who know him as an ancestor, or as an illustrious leader of their nation. The experience of sharing what I know with Occom’s communities, and also hearing from them about their knowledge (even if I’ll never know Occom as intimately) has been powerful and rewarding. It’s also given me a clearer sense of what scholarship can and can’t do.

Are there any classic works of fiction or nonfiction that you only read recently for the first time?

So many! The Poverty of Theory, a collection of essays, by E.P. Thompson. Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials by Judith Shklar. The 12^th-century philosophical novel, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (The Improvement of Human Reason), by Ibn Ṭufayl. The last of these I read because it’s on the syllabus for the Core Curriculum class, Contemporary Civilization, which I teach. My students love the book, and so do I.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

Travel in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson, who wrote several books reconstructing everyday life throughout the ancient Mediterranean. From what I can tell, his evidence consisted primarily of paintings on Greco-Roman pottery housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Based on his observation of these ceramics, Casson developed passionately defended theories about what it was like to live in antiquity. (He was a sort of anti-Keatsian in this respect.) I find all of his books enjoyable, even if they’re not 100% accurate.

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?

My partner, Lina, and I read The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole at a formative stage; I’m not sure what that says about our relationship, but we are very close. I don’t think I could be friends with anyone who couldn’t find a way to love Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. I’ve also occasionally accosted—or wrote to—writers whose books I admire. Philosophy Professor Akeel Bilgrami is an example. Connecting with people through their writing is an under-recognized privilege of being a scholar.

You’re hosting a dinner party. Which three scholars or writers, dead or alive, would you invite, and why?

Well, first of all, Samson Occom. But if he can’t make it:

Geoffrey Chaucer. He’d be a zealous eater, and a great listener. He could also let me know if my Middle English pronunciation is any good. I love reciting the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.

Baruch Spinoza. The most creative and committed philosopher I know of, who made friends with many different kinds of people.

Lord Byron. I suspect he’d be a little overbearing during dinner, but I’d like to have him around later in the evening.

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.

The series, which ended its three-season run earlier this year, depicted contemporary Native life through an irreverent yet sensitive lens. Cocreator and showrunner Sterlin Harjo successfully turned his sitcom into an avenue for social import by highlighting history and culture through strong character work. Reservation Dogs was also an explicit attempt to pave a future for Indigenous actors, writers, and directors in the film and television industry. This desire has already borne fruit in the past few years with Native-created shows like the Peacock sitcom Rutherford Falls, which was canceled last year, and the AMC thriller Dark Winds, both of which featured many overlaps in casting.

At the beginning of the series, Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor) are a band of friends (“Rez Dogs,” as they’re affectionately named) who commit petty crimes to save up enough money to flee their reservation for California. They steal copper from trucks and unload it onto the local scrapyard; they swipe food from stores and wholesalers and sell it to the town at a discount. It’s a plan forged in honor of their friend Daniel (Dalton Cramer), who recently committed suicide, and their shared belief that living in their small Native town will kill them as well.

The first season follows the crew as they prepare to leave Okern, but Harjo and company quickly expand beyond that plot to explore the reservation at large, including its many interconnected members. Rita (Sarah Podemski), Bear’s mother, works at the local Indian Health Services clinic, one of the main forums in the reservation, alongside other aunties in the area. Officer Big (Zahn McClarnon), a tribal cop obsessed with the supernatural, tries to enforce order despite people acting dismissive of his authority. Brownie (Farmer), Elora’s stoner “uncle” (really a close family friend), lives in the woods after years of alienating the community with his reckless behavior. Reservation Dogs diagrams two generations of elders, neatly divided between baby boomers and Generation X, both of whom were profoundly impacted by the sudden death of Cookie, Elora’s mother, in a drunken car wreck.

The fallout of grief from the deaths of young Daniel and Cookie has largely atomized the community; though they still occasionally gather out of tradition, their unresolved anguish has fractured close bonds. Reservation Dogs charts the slow restoration of community as they process their respective losses and regrets, with the Rez Dogs gradually learning to accept the reservation after initially rejecting it. Taking cues from filmmakers like Robert Altman and Richard Linklater, Harjo prefers a panoramic approach to his characters and frequently digresses from his core teen foursome to build out Okern as a microcosmic society with its own history and atmosphere. One episode follows Big on a psychedelic trip as he discovers a white-supremacist cult in the woods; another flashes back to 1976 and chronicles the group of elders as hard-partying high school graduates.

An abiding sense of soul-searching courses through Reservation Dogs. It’s reflected in the approach to direction and writing in a series that frequently incorporates spiritual interventions, inexplicable phenomena, and dialogues about faith. Harjo emphasizes that the quest for understanding never guarantees definitive answers, in this life or the next, but does require embracing Native conceptions of knowledge and tradition to better comprehend the present.

Harjo excavates this wellspring of cultural history to depict how Native practices not only connect people across space and time but can also help a community overcome collective sorrow. He emphasizes his actors’ ensemble in Reservation Dogs in service of a representational coup, demonstrating their capabilities as performers while organically humanizing Native customs. The idea that the Indigenous community is not a clichéd, monolithic body is something that can only be effectively communicated on-screen when Native people are at the helm.

From the early days of silent cinema, depictions of Native people and culture have largely been defined by stereotyping. Twentieth-century westerns frequently cast Indians as stock savages—and even when they weren’t primarily identified by their barbarism, they were portrayed as exaggeratedly saintly or noble figures. Harjo bucks decades of narrow typecasting by portraying a modern Indigenous community as a wide spectrum of familiar personalities, albeit with a unique vernacular and practices that subtly challenge Western orthodoxy. Reservation Dogs keeps the vast majority of casual, intra-Native slang (mvto, skoden, cvpon) unsubtitled for this reason—non-Native speakers must rely on easily discernible context clues to grasp its meaning, because the characters don’t speak for the benefit of outsiders. (One exception is the term “shitass,” a reservation argot parroted by every white or Native character in the series.)

Reservation Dogs repeatedly underscores the ordinariness of its characters as a way to challenge the othering gaze. Elders in the community like Brownie or Bucky (Studi) are portrayed as flawed men with their own histories of selfishness instead of as wise old-timers. Similarly, traditional healers like Old Man Fixico (Richard Ray Whitman) and Daniel’s mother Hokti (Lily Gladstone), who’s serving time in prison for undisclosed reasons, are neither especially righteous nor mystical. Instead, these spiritual leaders are merely everyday people dedicated to helping their community. They emphasize acts of service and pass on grounded ideas that will hopefully bring comfort in troubled times.

Ancestral visions are a common occurrence in the series, but Reservation Dogs frequently undermines their expected stoicism. Bear frequently sees a self-proclaimed warrior, William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth), who died at the Battle of Little Bighorn—only not in combat, but also after his horse tripped on a gopher hole. Both a sincere depiction of a spirit guide and a self-conscious critique of Native caricatures, Knifeman operates as an omniscient presence in Reservation Dogs, appearing to people in times of distress while also breaking the fourth wall, but his counsel remains cryptic or sarcastic.

Meanwhile, Deer Lady (Kaniehtiio Horn), a mythological being who takes the form of a beautiful woman with hooves, also recurs throughout the series, instructing kind souls and enacting vengeance against various evil men. She’s initially presented as a deus ex machina figure, helping vulnerable people out of dangerous situations. However, it’s revealed in the third-season episode “Deer Lady” that Reservation Dogs’ version of the figure is the product of an abusive American Indian boarding school from which she fled and was saved (as well as transformed) by an otherworldly deer as a young girl. Directed by Danis Goulet and written by Harjo, the episode uses the character’s origin story to explore a largely underexplored slice of Native history, depicting through a ’70s-horror-film lens how these government-backed institutions forcibly assimilated the Native population into Euro-American culture. They forbade Indigenous people from speaking their mother tongues, forced them to cut their hair and remove any traditional garb, and were rife with physical and sexual violence, all under the guise of Christianizing an oppressed population.

A stylistic departure from the rest of the series, “Deer Lady” is one of the few examples of Reservation Dogs’ adopting a somewhat educational tone, despite the episode’s genre trappings, and it concludes with a cathartic act of violence against the school’s aging proprietor. Yet the series also subtly illustrates how these schools evolved over the course of the last century. “House of Bongs,” a flashback episode set in 1976 that serves as a homage to Dazed and Confused, features another Native boarding school where the students proudly flaunt their cultural identity while voluntarily assimilating into American culture through music, fashion, and cars. Harjo doesn’t belabor this contrast in experiences, but rather implies that Native people should be characterized by their wide range of historical and social circumstances.

When asked to define “the rez” by a stranger, Cheese offers a brief, fair assessment: “Usually isolated, economically depressed, big dreams, not a lot of opportunities. Kind of a food desert.” Reservation Dogs embraces this description but nevertheless depicts reservation life through a nonjudgmental lens, acknowledging its adverse qualities without sensationalizing them. Parents in the community are either absent or relatively young, as many became pregnant when they were teenagers. Only Bear and Willie Jack consistently attend high school, while Elora and presumably Cheese are dropouts. Jobs are scarce and mostly limited to unskilled labor. Many adults in the community struggle with alcohol addiction or mental illness behind closed doors.

Harjo never shies away from these realities, but he also doesn’t present them as unique to the rez. When the series showcases Daniel in an extended flashback scene during the first season, we soon overhear his parents in a loud domestic dispute from outside his house. Later in the episode, we see signs of his erratic, depressive behavior in public, but Reservation Dogs keeps his mindset at a remove; his suicide doesn’t have one root cause, but it’s clear so many in the community failed to see the signs of his distress.

Reservation Dogs’ first two seasons largely follow the gang as they cope with Daniel’s death. The series highlights the dangers of repressing emotions instead of communicating them, considering the specter of colonialism that haunts their histories, but the candid earnestness with which the characters talk through their grief can sometimes cloy. Certain scenes between adults and the Rez Dogs regarding their regrets about Daniel’s death carry the patina of mental-health PSAs. The high premium that the series places on overt mourning so as not to perpetuate a cycle of silence is legitimate, but the execution of characters over-explicating their emotions can seem too much like the series instructing its audience on how to properly grieve.

On the other hand, Reservation Dogs achieves emotional power whenever it conveys grief through ritual. From the first episode, when the Rez Dogs hold a small memorial for Daniel on the first anniversary of his passing, to the funeral of Old Man Fixico, the rez’s respected medicine man, in the finale, the series excels at crafting sequences featuring ceremonial mourning. The second season’s best episode chronicles the community gathering around the bedside of Mabel (Geraldine Keams), Elora’s grandmother, as she’s about to pass. The camera pays witness to various prayers and deathbed rites; we watch as mourners prepare food and celebrate Mabel’s memory through stories and laughter. It’s effective because of the Native artists behind and before the camera: We’re watching them reenact scenes in which they themselves have participated.

When Mabel finally passes, she appears as a spirit to Elora, happy and smiling, something she couldn’t muster in life. Reservation Dogs parallels the deaths of Daniel and Mabel’s daughter Cookie as examples of lost potential and significant markers in the lives of the community, but also as a way to highlight the divergent ways their respective peers handled the loss. The two generations of elders split apart because of their grief, many of them permanently mired in guilt and remorse largely because they had little access to coping mechanisms. It’s here that we see one of the subtle achievements of Reservation Dogs: to feature aging and young Native actors on-screen together, to visually pay tribute to them while laying the groundwork for others to follow in their footsteps.

While far from perfect, Reservation Dogs stood as a genuine testament to the power of representation, which has become a hollow, catchall industry term for superficial on-screen diversity instead of a sincere attempt to reflect the racial makeup of the world. The ostensible promise of prestige TV was that it would provide the space for “niche” ideas to flourish; a flood of original programming across cable networks and streaming services allowed historically underrepresented people to receive financing and a platform, from which an original vision would inevitably arise. As that era comes to an end, and as greater austerity and homogeneity infect every corner of Hollywood, it’s easy to identify a show like Reservation Dogs as the last gasp of that more promising time.

Reservation Dogs ends with the entire community gathering to dig a grave and say a prayer, including the Rez Dogs, who the series makes clear have a promising future ahead of them both within and beyond the reservation. Harjo illustrates that, much like life and death, beginnings and endings are one and the same. But if the series represents the dying embers of a media era that opened its doors to untested talent, then the future remains decidedly uncertain, despite the abundance of Indigenous talent who have proven themselves on- and off-screen. If there’s any note of optimism, it might lie with Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, which was filmed on location in Osage and Washington counties in Oklahoma and was reportedly altered considerably from its initial conception through input from members of the Osage Nation, many of whom are prominently featured on-screen. Scorsese implicitly understood the power and necessity of Native authenticity to imbue his narrative of moral corruption and national rot. It’s a concept that Reservation Dogs embraced from the jump: Voices can be heard and then easily ignored, but it’s different when people actually listen.