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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and today a historic and critically acclaimed TV show celebrated its series finale. It's the first-ever show where series regulars, writers and directors are indigenous. I'm talking about Reservation Dogs, which dropped Season 3, Episode 10, bringing the suddenly stylized, beautifully compelling series to a close. Now, at first blush, the show seemed like a coming-of-age story featuring four teens on a mission to get to California.

They steal and they scheme and they wrestle with the morality of ripping off members of their own community but it was much more than that. The themes of intergenerational understanding, the impact of financial instability, the push and pull of tradition and how sometimes people are just straight-up weird, are told in a humorous and heart-wrenching way against the backdrop of a reservation in Oklahoma. The show is ending, according to co-creator Sterlin Harjo, because in his words, "It's a story that had an ending. It's a story about kids going through a very transitional moment. To me, the show is too important to drag out." The series finale of Reservation Dogs is available now. You can stream it on Hulu, and executive producer, director, and co-writer Sterlin Harjo joins me now. Hi, Sterlin, welcome back.

Sterlin Harjo: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm great. How does it feel to be on the other side of this series? It dropped today. Just how are you feeling?

Sterlin Harjo: It's a mixed bag of being happy about it, but also it's emotional and there's a lot of love that went into this, and a lot of things changed in the last three years. My life changed. A lot of people's lives changed. To go through that and to see it in the rearview mirror now all of a sudden, it's strange. It can be emotional.

Alison Stewart: You said that you wanted this show to be particularly of Oklahoma and distinctly native to Oklahoma. When you look back on it, how did that landscape and that setting with it and your relationship with that setting wind up shaping the show's arc?

Sterlin Harjo: It's everything. As far as Oklahoma goes, it is such a character in the show. Culturally, everything that you see is very true. Down to the finale, it's everything that you see. All of it, nothing is exaggerated or stretched. It's literally how life is. I was talking to people last night, friends of mine I haven't seen in a few years, they're Native, and they were talking about when it came out. They were from the town that we shoot in, and they were talking about when it came out how, I don't know, they respected it just because it was so normal, it's our life. Just the rest of the world didn't know what our lives were like. That was fascinating to people, I think, and brought a lot of people from the outside in because they were so interested in the culture and the everyday life of Native people in rural Oklahoma.

Alison Stewart: It was organic to the story. It wasn't like you put a big red arrow going, "Look at this now, understand this thing that's happening."

Sterlin Harjo: Right. I'm a sucker for subtlety, and sometimes I feel like I go too subtle, but it's always a balance of not being too subtle, but not hitting people over the head with a hammer. That's my style of storytelling, I guess.

Alison Stewart: I think a really good example, at least for me, the way I took it in was realizing that people were saying, thank you. The words, thank you. I don't want to try to put it, is it--

Sterlin Harjo: Mvto.

Alison Stewart: Mvto.

Sterlin Harjo: It's Mvto, yes.

Alison Stewart: There's no explanation, but you realize the way people are interacting. Oh, they're saying, "Thank you," and you've become accustomed to it and understand it.

Alison Stewart: Totally, just like you would if you were visiting a culture or another place where they spoke other languages, you just become accustomed to that word and learn it organically. That's really the experience that I wanted to create with the show, I think.

Alison Stewart: You told Terry Gross last year you grew up surrounded by the best storytellers. How did some of that storytelling, how did growing up around that and those people help you create this show and create the show you wanted?

Sterlin Harjo: My grandma on my dad's side was not Native. She married a Seminole man, a full-blooded Seminole man. Then on the other side, my grandma was a full-blood Native and my grandpa was Italian. He passed when I was five on my grandma's side. Then my Native grandpa on the other side passed when my dad was five. I grew up with these two matriarch, one non-Native, one Native. Then on the Native side, we have a very large family, uncles and aunts and everything.

There was always people sitting around telling stories. Some of it is magical and for some of it is folklore and some of it is mythological. I just absorbed all of it as a kid, like in the kitchen, they're sitting around laughing and telling stories and I would just absorb it. Then on the other hand, my grandmom, on the other side, my non-Native grandmom was like one of these really country, poor, rural as it gets, all you had to do was tell stories. That's what she was, and she was so great at telling stories, and she could remember everything, every detail and she would tell stories and paint these pictures in this way.

I owe a lot to both sides of my family.

I do think that the common denominator is rural Oklahoma. It's just a place where the natural world is most prevalent. Within that, there's a surrealism, I think, and mythology that is also a part of it. I think that it's about I just was surrounded by stories and I absorbed them. I was always having them repeat stories that I'd heard a hundred times. Then the same thing with movies. I would repeat movies and watch movies over and over and over with my dad.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sterlin Harjo, co-creator of Reservation Dogs, the series finale dropped today. I want to go back to the casting process, if you can take it back in your mind. You had to get these four kids, Cheese, Bear, Elora and Willie Jack. What were you looking for in actors, you and your team?

Sterlin Harjo: I was looking for actors that were like the characters that I had written but that would also surprise me and that's what I got. Like Paulina who plays Willie Jack, that role was supposed to be a boy. She was auditioning for Elora. She was so great, but I didn't quite think Elora, but she was so great. Then I just re-envisioned, what if she plays Willie Jack? Taika and I both talked about this. She did. I rewrote everything to tailor to her as a female Willie Jack.I t, obviously, paid off.

Same thing with Cheese. Cheese was not exactly what I envisioned, but his personality was so special and unique and sensitive and caring and really great that I just knew that that would be a great way to have Cheese's character be. I just tailored it to him after I met him.

Alison Stewart: Willie Jack is this played by, you said, Paulina Alexis. My friend, Jada, I texted her last night. She's Wampanoag. She texted me back. She loves the show, and she texted me back, "I love the character Willie Jack. She is my person. She is honestly the first person I saw on TV that really truly saw myself in and everyone says she is me."

Sterlin Harjo: Oh, that's so great. Because last night I was telling you, I was with some friends from the community where I shot and there was one girl there that was really making me laugh last night and she was saying that-- She had a hat on backwards, and she was like telling me she said, "When that show came out, I didn't know what people were talking about at first, because I hadn't watched it." She worked at a gas station, and she said that everyone would ask her if she was that girl. She was like, "What are you talking about?"

They thought that she was Willie Jack. She literally started, every now and then, somebody would buy her a drink or something. She'd be like, "That's me, that's me."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I want to play a clip of Willie Jack. We really see her developing a mentorship over the season with Old Man Fixico who wants to pass along knowledge of traditional medicine. He passes away, she's having all kinds of feelings. This clip is Willie Jack is visiting her aunt in prison, who is also the mother of their friend Daniel, who passes away. We learned that in the first season. We'll hear Hokti talking about a spirit named Smiley, and we'll let this unfold. We can talk about it on the other side and the character development. This is from Reservation Dogs.

Willie Jack: It feels like I didn't get to spend enough time with him. Like he left before I got to learn anything from him. We spent a lot of time together.

Smiley: Say something important.

Hokti: Thanks, Smiley.

Willie Jack: Are you talking to that spirit?

Hokti: Yes. She is always just leering at me. I want her new snag. This old cowboy, always going on about his mushroom trips and dropping acid in the desert. Oh, my boots, sonic waves, transcendence, all that bull--

Willie Jack: I think I met her.

Hokti: Now listen, I know it feels like Fixico is gone. I don't know where he is but he's also not gone at the same time.

Alison Stewart: So many times there are visitations from spirits, from others. One of the characters, Bear, from the beginning of the show to the end of the show, has the spirit who comes to him who is, at times, wise, also wacky as well. What does Bear specifically come to understand about the value of these visits and these visitations?

Sterlin Harjo: I think that Bear realizes that there was something in his life that was missing, whether that's his dad or whatever, or his friend Daniel that had passed and that Spirit was there to fill that and to also guide him in weird ways. I think he misses it. I think he knows the value that it-- After he tells Spirit to go away earlier in the season, I think he knows he has to go it alone and he starts to value the lessons that William Knifeman. Also, he comes of age. That's the thing about a coming-of-age story, is you come of age at some point. I think that we see him do that. With that, he also knows that he has to tell William Knifeman, goodbye.

I think it's a really cool-- And it's like, did he create it? I don't know. Was it in his head? I don't know, but it helped him regardless. I think that, in Native communities, that's what I love, is that there's not a lot of division between the mythological and the surreal and reality. It's very matter-of-fact. Taika and I actually, in the beginning, talked a lot about that's what I wanted to capture. I wanted it all to be the same and not separated. Not like, "Ooh, this is story time," or we tell a story about this mythological being. No. It's all a part of our life, everyday stories, because that's how it is in our communities and that's what I wanted to show. That's part of it.

Alison Stewart: My guess is Sterlin Harjo. We're talking about Reservation Dogs. The series finale dropped today. Throughout the series, especially the season, we get some depictions of the deleterious effects of colonization of the Indian Child Welfare Act, of the brutality of the missionary boarding schools. How are you thinking about introducing those historical wrongs into this series?

Sterlin Harjo: I don't know. It's hard to say if I thought about it. I can't remember if I thought about it as much as-- We have a platform and we had a lot of fans, and I have to do something with that, and I have to do it in my way. My favorite way to do that is through just storytelling. Because I didn't approach the Dear Lady episode thinking like, "Oh, I'm going to teach people." That was a byproduct of it. I was really blown away when all the messages were like, "Thank you for showing us this side of history that I didn't know about," or whatever.

I know about this stuff. My grandparents were there, my mom was there, so it's not something that I'm like, "Ooh, I'm going to teach them that one," because it was just part of my life. I don't really think of it in that way where-- In my mind, everyone knew about it. I just wanted to tell it truthfully, and I wanted to show some of the more impactful moments in Native life, and that is one of them, obviously, because that changed everything.

There's something that Hokti says at the end, which is like, "What do you think they came for when they tried to get rid of us?" They came for community because they knew if they broke community, they would break the individual. That Boarding School episode really fits into the overall themes of community to me. It is about violence against that community. That's why it's in there.

Alison Stewart: I've got two texts. People are just texting in because they love the show. "Reservation Dogs are so beautiful. I'm utterly bereft that we are losing the opportunity to continue the relationship. The episode where the grandmother passed was stunningly beautiful." This one says, "Hi. Alison, can you ask Sterlin to start a campaign to get Paulina Alexis to be the first indigenous host of Saturday Night Live?"

Sterlin Harjo: I would love that.

Alison Stewart: All right.

Sterlin Harjo: I would love to. That Mabel episode where the grandmother passes, again, that is my life. That was my grandma. That's exactly what happened when my grandma passed. Down to when Big brings the giant squash, my friend Ryan RedCorn brought a giant squash to my house that we didn't know what to do with. [chuckles] I think when a story is that personal, it's hard to go wrong, and it's also hard to keep it going forever because you are putting your life into it. It's not a crime show. It's not X-Files. I can't just make up a plot. It is my life. At a certain point, it ends.

Alison Stewart: Was there something in the show, in the course of the series, that you took a hard line on like, "This has to be part of this show. Don't care whatever notes I'm getting, don't care what feedback I'm getting, I just know in my core, in my gut, in my creative mind's eye, this has to be part of this show."?

Sterlin Harjo: There was a lot. I think that there was a lot, but I also had a lot of freedom through FX to do that. One of the biggest ones was shooting in Oklahoma. Early on, there were talks about shooting in New Mexico and I told them, my agents and everyone, I said that I wouldn't make the show. This is after it was greenlit. I was like, "Well, I won't make the show if we shoot anywhere else."

My argument was that with Native and Indigenous people, the land is the most important thing in a story about us. These characters represent people who were forcibly removed by the US government to Indian territory, Oklahoma, in the 1800s and a lot of people passed away and it took a lot to survive that, and so it's really important. If I'm telling the story of their descendants, it needs to be in the place where they ended up at the end of the Trail of Tears.

To my surprise, FX was just like, "Oh yes, we're shooting. Sure. Let's do it." Once I told them that, they were like, "Oh yes, of course. Cool." There were a lot of things that I knew that needed to be in there. Paulina wearing slides is the smallest version of that. It's like, got to have slides and socks. He's got to have some basketball shorts. There were certain things and style that needed to be in there, but I think so much of the show is what you're asking, is like was that. It has to be that to be real.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting. One TV critic called Episode 8 the perfect season finale. Episode 10 is the season finale because Episode 8 has a lot of action in it and it ends more quietly.

Sterlin Harjo: I think that our finale is the perfect finale. I think that it ends in the way that the show should end. It ends in humor and it ends in heartbreak but it ends in hope and it ends with everyone being there. I think that was part of it, was there was a lot of people in Episode 8, which I love Episode 8, but there was a lot of people that were missing from that episode. I think that the finale is perfect.

Alison Stewart: The series finale of Reservation Dogs dropped today. I was speaking with its co-creator, Sterlin Harjo. Sterlin, thank you so much for being with us and thank you for the show.

Sterlin Harjo: Thank you so much.

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