It's Nearly Impossible to Get on Disability

What Reservation Dogs got aggressively wrong

We’re taking a break from the street for a moment to look inward, by which I mean into our television screens. (Or computer screens or phones or whatever device you use to escape into narrative when you’re done with people). The first season of Reservation Dogs blew my mind so hard I sometimes feel like I’m still picking up the shimmering shards; it was unbelievably thoughtful, fearlessly believable, utterly wrenching when it needed to be, and funnier than anything I had seen in a long, long, time. I was looking forward to the second season. But the second season, as it happens, was not looking forward to people with disabilities.

In the first season, there were no people with disabilities, and there was no mention of people with disabilities, and I AM FINE WITH THAT! I KINDA HAVE NO CHOICE. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AS FINE WITH THAT AS OTHER PEOPLE ARE. But in the second season, a moment arose that I really tried to rationalize as a realistic word that an elder with an unfettered and sometimes crass spirit would harp on. I figured, and wanted to believe, that the word, repeated though it was, represented a one-off moment, not, you know, a thing. But then it was followed by something else, a lot longer, a lot deeper, a lot more impactful than a moment. It was a prolongued exchange, replete with such jackhammering of outdated sterotypes and radiating such profound ignorance that I couldn’t believe that anyone who had a hand in writing season one had stuck a single finger in the premiere of season two.

In the first moment, the aforementioned elder is told a lot of surprising things about Crazy Horse, the most mundane of which is that the warrior had a “gimpy leg.” The joke, I think, is that of all the wild details, “gimpy leg” was the one that this singular uncle character focused on. I won’t try to describe the experience of having cerebral palsy and hearing “gimpy leg” repeated on the same show that uses the phrase, “she muff or he muff or they muff” to respect all possible pubic hair incarnations, or has a child introduce himself with his pronouns (which reflect his conventional presentation) or has a gravelly-voiced conservative poor white guy with an expectedly burly appearence say, “If that’s true, then I’m a sex worker in Paris.” Anybody looking knows that dude would say hooker. (I support sex workers passionately, but I don’t think supporting sex workers and supporting disabled people have to be contradictory causes!)

In the scene that made my heart drop into the depths of my stomach where it still resides as I write this, in that boiling pit that tends to collect every brush I have with ableism, two conservative white dudes sit at a bar while the teenage protagonists ask plot-related questions. “Do either of you have jobs?” one of the conservative white men asks. The teenagers look down and shake their heads, clearly feeling an undeserved shame.

“What’s your job?” asks the boy in the duo, genuinely curious about a fellow human being.

“You’re lookin’ at it,” the man answers, taking a long swig on his beer bottle.

“Drinking?” the boy asks. He’s not mocking; he wants to make sure he understands.

“No,” the man says. “I’m on Disability.”

Before the teenagers leave, he tells them a couple more times that they should get jobs. And here’s the thing about people who are on Disability: they have to have a very long history working jobs. There was a time there about 48 hours ago when I thought I would never in a million years tell the reading public that part of the money I get to live comes from the government, because if there’s one thing that can send an American artist into a spiral of years-long depression and insurmountable self-loathing, it’s the reminder that you’re not as useful to capitalism as you’re expected to be. I can’t work retail, because standing for long periods is painful, and I can’t wait tables, because my crutch-handles prevent me from carrying most anything. I also don’t have a drivers’ lisence, because any car that I’d learn to drive on would have to have hand controls rather than foot controls, and those adaptations are expensive. This limits the number of jobs I can physically go out and do, but I don’t qualify for Disability. You know why? I haven’t worked enough.

“But your dad worked plenty,” said the woman at the social security office, back when I applied in 2006. My dad, if you don’t know, died suddenly at age 50 when I was 22. The assistance that I turned out to qualify for are Survivors’ Benefits: that is, the social security that my father, born in 1956, would be recieving if he were still on this plane.

All this to say: you cannot qualify for disability if all you do is sit around getting drunk. If you do qualify for disability under that circumstance, it means you’ve worked your ass to the bone for decades. You might have earned a beer or two. This is not to say that anyone’s entitled to hassle children or shame anyone of any age for not having a job. But if this is our disabled representation, then how much humanity-based respect can we assume this show has for the unemployed? Reservation Dogs is intended to be a fierce, un-pandering takedown of colonialism, but there’s nothing subversive about villianizing the people that Western society has already deemed useless, unworthy, and burdonsome. None of us are free until…until who is what, again?