Abstract

Audiences have been drawn to Reservation Dogs (2021-2023) because of its life-giving humor and portrayal of contemporary Indigenous realities. Yet the series truly gains its rhetorical power as the creators pair humor with intergenerational kinship to process diverse forms of unresolved grief. In fact, through narrative, the filmmakers map out processing grief and bonding through humor as healthy components of intergenerational kinship, and they position Indigenous youth as leading that balanced approach to kinship. I refer to this artistic rhetorical mapping as visual kinship mapping and I view it as a filmic manifestation of cultural mapping processes described by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the Indigenous Mapping Collective, and others. Place-based, relational mapping is the rhetorical work of Reservation Dogs, and that work is especially oriented toward young audiences who learn from their elders in the present and perpetuate that knowledge into the future. As visually sovereign filmmakers (Michelle H. Raheja), Harjo, Waititi, and their Indigenous team of filmmakers call young audiences to be agents for kinship-focused resurgence, a concept that has been defined and expanded by scholars such as Simpson, Taiaiake Alfred, and Jeff Corntassel. The creators make the concept of resurgent intergenerational kinship accessible to youth using humor, and the series' young protagonists exemplify holistic emotional wellness as they tend to their grieving elders, inviting them, as actor and comedian Dallas Goldtooth says, to "react with their whole selves" to the continuing effects of colonization. Building on current resurgence and Indigenous studies scholarship, this thesis analyzes Reservation Dogs as a rhetorical representation of Indigenous youth leading their communities toward more expansive intergenerational kinship.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; English

Rights

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