D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Sterlin Harjo talk 'Reservation Dogs'

By Michael Ordoña

Photography by

Jennifer McCord

Aug. 12, 2024 3:30 AM PT

Two Muscogee Nation teens, lifelong friends (along with their two other Rez Dogs pals), have been painfully at odds. Bear (played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), who thinks he’s the group’s leader, has felt abandoned by Elora (Devery Jacobs), its most driven member. She has been discovering the world beyond their home as he has grown more deeply involved with their community. In the series finale of “Reservation Dogs,” the funeral of one of the pillars of that community brings them together again. Elora finds Bear alone — in the presence of the casket — to tell him she’s leaving for college.

“The heart of the scene is them trying to come together and tell each other bye and that they love each other,” showrunner and co-creator Sterlin Harjo says. “But you throw a funeral in, you throw a dead body in, all this stuff surrounding it and their lack of communication skills, and it can end up being a really beautiful thing just from behavior. And that’s what happened.”

Earlier in the series, Bear had shown a selfish, immature streak. He’s likely to react badly to Elora’s hard-to-break news. You feel her bracing for it. He says nothing, eyes down, mouth tight. When she tries to cushion the blow, he says he just needs a moment. After gathering himself, he reveals a warm smile and congratulates her.

“Bear can hold a grudge,” says Woon-A-Tai, who has Oji-Cree tribal heritage. “It was a really beautiful moment for him to let go of that and realize, ‘It’s not all about me.’ There were more issues at hand than what his personal issues are with Elora. These are people who see each other as brother and sister, and they’ve known each other since they were young, so they get on each other’s a—.

“And it was very sad for me to do it because it really did feel like the end,” he adds.

Harjo says, “They were so good in that scene. I cried many, many a time in the edit.”

Four teens peek around a wall in "Reservation Dogs."

“Reservation Dogs” graced us with three unique, heartfelt, hilarious seasons to reach Harjo’s planned conclusion. The frequently irreverent, sometimes spooky and often emotional comedy followed its four self-named Rez Dogs growing into themselves in their small Oklahoma town.

The story began with them still grappling with the death of one of their own, a year after the fact. Harjo saw that struggle as the show’s arc all along. And having brought the kids to a better place emotionally, it was time.

“The ending’s kind of built into the opening,” he says, explaining the show couldn’t end “without seeing these kids find hope or find how to grieve, to come to a place where they’re grieving healthier. That’s what it’s about. Without the ending, you don’t have the story. It didn’t feel right to just keep it going.”

For its final season, the two-time Peabody and Spirit winner and three-time AFI honoree finally received Emmy recognition: five nominations, including for comedy series and a first nod for lead actor Woon-A-Tai.

Woon-A-Tai’s Bear starts the show as a fatherless, directionless teen and grows into a young man with purpose. Just 22 now, the actor did some growing up on the set himself. “It was very beautiful to have spent the three years with my castmates and the crew, watching all of us grow. And even more than that, watching the arc that Sterlin and the writers accomplished. It’s a big topic in Indian country, how a Native youth can become a man without a positive father figure in his life. And that is because of the community that surrounds him.”

Growing together as an on- and off-camera family made it all the more difficult to learn of Harjo’s plan to end the show at the conclusion of Season 3.

D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai hunkers down outside for a portrait.

“I can remember exactly when Sterlin took us aside, when we were filming the bus episode [a harebrained caper story] and we’re all on the bus together. We were having a lot of fun. It felt like your father telling you, ‘We have to leave the amusement park.’ We’re having such a great time in the middle of going down a great slide and you hear, ‘We got to leave soon.’ ”

Completing those arcs and leaving it there felt like the ideal ending. The final season holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “Bittersweet” is the word that comes to mind.

“For me, [that scene with Jacobs and Woon-A-Tai] felt like we were saying goodbye to the audience and ‘It’s going to be OK, we’re going to see each other around,’” Harjo says, quoting Elora. “And I love that Bear acknowledges that, ‘Yeah, we’ll see each other’ — she’ll come visit, but he also kind of doesn’t believe it because he knows that there’s so much that can happen between now and then. He carried all of that in him in that answer. And it was kind of talking to the audience as well.”

The finale contained more than one farewell. William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth), the ghost of a Native warrior from the 1800s who served as Bear’s offbeat spirit guide, said in his final manifestation before the young man, “I can’t really say ‘goodbye’ because that’s like a colonial way of talking. Yeah. Our people say stuff like, ‘See you later!’ or ‘Peace!’ because we don’t have a word for ‘goodbye.’”

Harjo says, “The next spring, I was driving through Okmulgee, [Okla.] where we usually shoot, and it would’ve been when all of the cast and the crew were coming together to make a new season. That’s when I got emotional. It hit me; that family’s not coming together again this year.”

It’s hard not to think of Elora and Bear expressing their love, crying and embracing as they accept the end of what they had.