Call for Papers

Book collection on the television series Reservation Dogs

Co-editors Timothy Petete and Joanna Hearne

University of Oklahoma Press

Reservation Dogs, co-created by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo, is the Indigenous television show we’ve been waiting for.  Reservation Dogs speaks directly to Indigenous viewers, and reaches out to all, with its camera pointed to the small towns, isolated Native churches, ranch houses, Indian Health Service clinics, and scrapyards of rural Oklahoma.

The show is at the center of an expansive network of artists that showrunner Sterlin Harjo and others have brought into the all-Native writer’s room and onto the set. This generous work building capacity and expanding professional pipelines for Native arts has meant making space for film directors to try television, giving actors a chance to write or direct for the first time, and introducing young people to realms of professional performing and filmmaking opportunity.  Bringing together nonprofessional actors (especially community members and young people) with trained actors and with Indigenous luminaries like Joy Harjo, the show works across modes from comedy to drama, with powerful stories of families and communities in transition across generations and languages, cities and rural reservations.

Significant to this visionary storytelling is the powerful humor of Reservation Dogs. In contrast with the stiflingly earnest and somber atmospherics of so many outsider, industrially-produced representations of Indians—the overwrought speeches, stoic characters, tragic modes of lament, and freighted, glossy epics—Reservation Dogs has tapped Indigenous people’s genius for comedy.  Yet in the midst of teasing, healing laughter, and making fun of just about everyone and everything, the show also takes on some of the most deep and difficult subjects for Indigenous communities.

This collection focuses on Reservation Dogs as inclusive, multifaceted, multi-genre; we welcome submissions on all aspects of the show (both on screen and behind the scenes) and from a variety of creative arts and research methodologies, and particularly welcome submissions from artists, writers, journalists, and scholars familiar with Oklahoma’s Indigenous communities.

We invite contributions (creative or critical) related but not exclusive to the following topics:

• Storytelling in and around Reservation Dogs
• Visual arts, material culture, craft, fashion, costume and set design
• Interviews with creators, writers, cast, and crew
• The importance of the first all-Indigenous television writing room
• Interrelationships with other media, such as social media or painting
• Interrelationships with other forms of performance, such as sketch comedy
• Reservation Dogs’ music, including hip hop, Mvskoke language hymns, and other genres
• Reservation Dogs’ representations of Indigenous human and more-than-human kinship
• Relationships with intangible cultural heritage
• Relationships with Indigenous ecologies, eco-media and earth elements
• Reservation Dogs and Indigenous activism, including social media activism
• Aesthetics of Indigenous television
• Intertextuality with other television and screen media
• Fourth Cinema frameworks and sovereignty of the camera
• Sound (voice-over, sound design, music videos) and sonic sovereignty
• Indigenous language activism and language preservation
• Queer Indigenous Studies/Two-Spirit presence and storytelling
• Environmental, pedagogical, cultural, and historical content
• Permissions, intellectual property, and copyright
• Television production and local and tribal protocols and consultation
• Reflections from the set
• Institutional infrastructures and/or funding structures in relation to the production including Hulu/FX, other private or industry funding, relationships with state agencies, awards programs, and film festivals

Submitting a Proposal

Proposals, consisting of a title, roughly 200-word description or abstract, list of indicative references, projected word and image count, and short author’s bio and contact information should be sent to tpetete@uco.edu and jhearne@ou.edu by January 10, 2024.

The submission deadline for accepted, full articles (8,000-word limit, including notes and bibliography) and other works (interviews, creative writing, visual art, etc.) is July 1, 2024.

Please address any questions to Timothy Petete or Joanna Hearne (tpetete@uco.edu and jhearne@ou.edu)