"Deer Lady" is the third episode of the third season of the comedy and teen drama television series Reservation Dogs. It is also the twenty-first episode overall. The episode was written by the program's showrunner and co-creator, Sterlin Harjo, and directed by Danis Goulet. Continuing on from the events of the previous episode, Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), looking for his way back to Oklahoma, receives help from Deer Lady (Kaniehtiio Horn). Throughout the episode, Deer Lady's backstory is explored.

Inspired by 1970s horror films and 1990s indie films, the episode focuses on the history of American Indian boarding schools and also makes use of the endangered Kiowa language. The production team consulted multiple subject matter experts to ensure that the topic was accurately represented. Post-production staff faced challenges in perfecting the audio as well as editing and scoring it.

The episode was first released on FX on Hulu on August 9, 2023. It received positive reviews from critics, particularly for its production design and depiction of Deer Lady's backstory. It also won an Art Directors Guild Award and was nominated for a Creative Arts Emmy Award and Gold Derby Television Award.

On a road trip, Deer Lady stops at a convenience store restroom to rinse blood off of a pair of antlers and then continues on her drive. In a flashback, she recalls her childhood when she was still human and part of a group of Native American children who were kidnapped and taken to an American Indian boarding school, St. Nicholas Indian Training School. Upon their arrival, many of the children are forced to have their hair cut by the nuns in charge.

Back in the present day, Deer Lady stops at a nearby diner and orders two pies. In further flashbacks, she has more memories of the boarding school, as she was chastised for speaking her native language and heard a child being beaten in the middle of the night by James Minor, the man who ran the boarding school.

Bear, one of the Rez Dogs, arrives at the diner, lost and without money, while looking for a way back to Okern, Oklahoma. Deer Lady observes him for a while, then invites him to sit with her. She shares her food and offers him a ride back. When he realizes who she is, he is frightened but does not leave.

After still more flashbacks in which Deer Lady remembers witnessing graves being dug at the boarding school and assimilating into mainstream culture by learning a hymn as well as how to farm, she offers Bear a ride home. On the way, she stops at Minor's house and tells Bear to remain in the truck. Minor, now an old man, invites her in and reminisces about his time running the school, causing Deer Lady to recollect escaping from the school into a forest where she encounters an otherworldly deer. She then stabs Minor with her antlers, killing him. Afterwards, she drives Bear back to Okern and visits the grave of a friend from the school.

"Deer Lady" was written and by showrunner and co-creator Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee^[1]) and directed by Danis Goulet (Cree/Métis^[1]).^[2][3] Harjo wrote the episode as a split script, alternating scenes between the present day and flashbacks. The episode explores the origin story of Deer Lady, its titular character and a recurring character within the series, notably the events that led to her becoming a spirit and her justifications for murder.^[4] Also known as Deer Woman, Deer Lady is a Native American myth known for her associations with love and fertility but also for her vengeance on men who have harmed women and children.^[5]

Within the series, both actors portraying the main characters are also Indigenous: Deer Lady, enacted by Kaniehtiio Horn (Kahnawake Mohawk^[1]), and Bear, enacted by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Oji-Cree^[1]), who is also the only main series cast member appearing in this episode.^[5][6]

Flashback scenes take the form of a period drama with an educational tone, unusual for the series, depicting the story of Native American assimilation at American Indian boarding schools.^[7][8] Harjo said he felt an obligation to "tell some truths" about this and wanted to "show people what the reality was",^[7] including themes of historical trauma, even in small ways.^[9] For instance—inspired by the way the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher from the Peanuts film franchise was made to sound like a trombone—Harjo decided that the English speech of the nuns at the school should sound like gibberish to viewers just as the Native schoolchildren would have experienced it.^[7][10]

The episode is one of two that Goulet directed for the season, along with the season premiere, "Bussin".^[11] She and Harjo drew inspiration from horror films of the 1970s for scenes set at the boarding school. Goulet stated that she wanted to specifically draw from this era because of the mixture of "intense realism" and "something fantastical",^[7] although she also named the 2018 reboot of Suspiria as an influence.^[7] The current-day scenes in the diner, however, use elements similar to indie films from the 1990s.^[12]

Denise Lajimodiere, the author of Stringing Rosaries, a book about American Indian boarding schools, was on set to ensure authentic representation in the flashback scenes.^[4] Spiritual leaders and parents were also on set during the filming of these scenes to help the child actors feel more comfortable.^[7]

Scenes at the school make use of Kiowa, an endangered language of which only 20 native speakers remain.^[7] Warren C. Queton (Kiowa/Cherokee/Seminole^[13]), a language consultant, was hired to assist young performers with their pronunciation, holding Zoom meetings with the children before filming began for lessons on speaking the language.^[4][14] One of the child actors, Georgeanne Growingthunder (Fort Peck/Sioux/Nakoda/Kiowa/Mvskoke/Seminole^[15])—cast in the role of the young Deer Lady—was already in the process of learning the language. Another child actor, Michael Podemski-Bedard, who portrays Koda, was the son of actress Jennifer Podemski (of Muscowpetung descent^[16]), who appears in the show as Dana.^[7]

For Goulet, several school scenes in the episode were particularly challenging, in particular the one that included a Native American child getting a haircut. This was because Native American beliefs about hair caused the production team to spend weeks deciding whether to use a wig or to actually cut a child's hair, considering that in many Native cultures hair is cut only during mourning. After much input was received about this, the decision was finally made to film an actual haircut when a child actor was located who was already going to have one.^[12] In another scene near the end of the episode, Goulet initially intended to zoom in as the murder is committed but later decided to use a close-up technique after the murder because she felt it captured the emotion better.^[7] Thus the director of photography, Mark Schwartzbard, used a Steadicam to film Deer Lady as she exits the house and walks away for a "heavy but graceful" effect.^[9]

Horn has commented that in playing Deer Lady, she drew on memories from personal experience to guide her acting in the episode, specifically recalling how her older sister, Waneek Horn-Miller, was bayoneted and nearly died while holding her as a young child during the Canadian Oka Crisis in 1990.^[17]

Patrick Hogan, the sound supervisor, and Mato Wayuhi (Oglala Lakota^[18]), the music composer, were tasked with achieving the intended sound effect for the nuns' gibberish. Hogan said that takes filmed by Goulet of the nuns speaking gibberish were unusable because it sounded like a "German–Dutch" hybrid.^[19] The post-production team then asked the actresses who portrayed the nuns to return to the studio so they could attempt automated dialogue replacement (ADR)—mixing up the words within their sentences instead—but according to Hogan, this attempt made them sound too much like Yoda.^[19]

Hogan then teamed up with the dialogue editor, David Beadle, who determined that they needed to manipulate the audio quality. They used a lower pitch for the nuns' voices, which made "nonsense ad-libs and mismatched English sound as booming as a dragon's bellow", and then reversed the voices to complete the effect.^[19]

A similar technique was used in one of the final scenes, in which the young Deer Lady comes across a deer spirit in the forest who speaks to her. The deer's dialogue was recorded in the Kiowa language, voiced by one of the remaining native speakers. Wayuhi provided a musical score for this scene, and the dialogue was fit to this score to make it sound more lyrical, and he described the final musical cue as a "challenge to find a median between hopefulness and hopelessness."^[19]

According to Goulet, the episode's editor, Varun Viswanath, stated that he was "very emotional" during the process and that the editing was going more slowly than normal.^[4] Viswanath also called it "the most challenging thing to work on" and said that there were probably "40 different compelling cuts of this episode in our Avid projects", referring to a software application.^[20] After he and Goulet were satisfied with the director's cut, the episode was passed on to Harjo and another editor, Patrick Tuck, who made the final cut.^[20]

Featured music in the episode included two songs from Mali Obomsawin (Odanak/Abenaki^[21]), "Fractions" and "Lineage"; two songs from Durwood Daily Haddock, "How Lonesome Can I Get" and "Start All Over"; and one song from Don Mcginnis, "Memory Bound".^[22]

Due to the episode's depictions of kidnapping and abuse, a viewer discretion notice was added to the opening of the episode at the suggestion of Horn, who brought up the idea to Harjo.^[17][23]

"Deer Lady" was released on Hulu on August 9, 2023, under its FX on Hulu content banner.^[2] Reviewing the episode for IndieWire, Proma Khosla called it "one of the show's best and most powerful yet, honing in on the trauma and folklore behind one character".^[24] The A.V. Club's Manuel Bentacourt wrote that the episode was a "transcendent half hour of television" and commented that he appreciated the series explained Deer Lady's origin rather than just using general folklore.^[25] Hannah Giorgis of The Atlantic stated that the episode had a "viscerally unnerving style".^[26] Paste ranked the episode as the second-best of the series.^[27] The Oklahoman ranked Bear meeting Deer Lady as the third-best moment of the entire Reservation Dogs series.^[28]

Several of the reviews commented on the gibberish spoken by the nuns. Alan Sepinwall from Rolling Stone opined that it was a "smart stylistic choice" and that it sounded as if it had "been placed into a food processor, chopped up and reassembled at random, and then run through a few audio filters." He later commented, "There's a cost to being a person, but there's also a cost to being a Deer Lady, and this episode beautifully captures that cost."^[29] Vulture critic Kali Simmons compared the gibberish to what the spirits in the Black Lodge speak in the horror television series Twin Peaks.^[30]

During the 2023 Art Directors Guild Awards, production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly won an Excellence in Production Design award for Half-Hour Single-Camera Television Series for his contributions to "Deer Lady".^[31] Horn received an honorable mention as TVLine's Performer of the Week in August 2023, with the editor describing her performance as having "exhibited beautiful depth and a full spectrum of emotions" and referring to the episode as "one of the series' most powerful yet."^[32] In the 2024 Gold Derby Television Awards, Harjo and Goulet picked up nominations for the episode's writing and direction.^[33] At the 76th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards—a version of the Primetime Emmys that awards achievements in crafts—in 2024, Schwartzbard also received a nomination in the Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Half-Hour Series category for his work on the episode.^[34]

• "Deer Lady" at IMDb