Indigenous Religion in Popular Fiction: The Case of Yellowjackets
Note: This essay is, I hope, to be run eventually in some more “august” format such as a journal focusing on theology, on popular culture, or on both; however, the slow pace of publication in many such outlets, in combination with the fact that a third season of the show is currently in production, made me believe that time was of the essence when it came to getting this out in some form or another. Thus I am running it here first.—Saint John’s Eve 2024
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The wildly popular (in some circles) television show Yellowjackets, which so far has two seasons out of a planned five and airs on the American cable channel Showtime, tells the story of a turf war between a Francophone demon and an albino moose for the souls of a team of ambiguously lesbian soccer players.
I hope that the rhetorical strategies I am employing in saying so—attention-grabbing overstatement, deliberately strange wording of concepts that are in fact more ordinary, leading with an extremely confident assertion of a view my actual grounds for holding which are more tenuous—are clear to most readers. I also hope, however, to make it clear that this is a genuinely held interpretation of the program. Not only is it a genuinely held interpretation, it is an eminently defensible one based on Yellowjackets’s style and tone, narrative conceits, and genre antecedents.
To avoid overloading this essay with ponderous “expository” material, and in deference to the precedents set in “acafandom” writing on more established genre canons like Star Trek and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, this essay will at various points presuppose the reader’s familiarity with the characters, situations, and visual and auditory aggregates depicted in Yellowjackets. Readers who have not seen the show can consult breakdowns of the first two seasons on entertainment websites including Vulture, The Cut, and Cosmopolitan, although these also contain elements of subjective review and not everything that has been said online about the show’s aesthetic or narrative quality aligns with my own opinions.
Much of Yellowjackets’s unique thematic richness when it comes to the issues that this essay will address—issues involving religion, indigeneity, ruralism and the “Wilderness” topos, and their relationships with one another and with more obvious issues in the show such as gender—occurs by accident. For example, the indigeneity-related subtext informing the character of Lottie Matthews (and the closest relationships that she has with white characters, Laura Lee and later on Natalie Scatorccio), subtext that is substantial and is by turns endlessly fascinating and somewhat troubling, cannot have been intentional from the beginning because the mixed-Maori actress Courtney Eaton was matched with the character through a race-blind casting process. Yet by the show’s second season efforts are clearly being made to establish this as an intentional element of the character, such as the casting of another mixed-Maori actress, Simone Kessell, as Lottie’s older self.
Nor is this to be wondered at. Television production is a collaborative process and an element of serendipity, chance, fate, or providence is inevitably one of the collaborators.[1] Authorial intent in this context is an important consideration when thinking through why the show is the way it is—attempts to artificially bracket out authorial intent as a consideration are just as limiting to one’s understanding of a text as are attempts to artificially inflate it—but it clearly cannot be the whole story. For example, the extremely common belief among the show’s viewers that the character of Jackie Taylor comes across as a closeted lesbian can be amply backed up with comments to that effect from writers, directors, actresses, and so on, yet there is also an element of sheer reader response in the audience’s decision that Jackie is simply more legible as a lesbian character.
The intentional aspects of the show’s religious commentary mostly involve either what get called the dueling “supernatural and rational” explanations for some of the events that take place (incorrectly; supernatural and rational are not, properly, antonyms or a dichotomy) or the motif of cannibalism itself. The “supernatural or rational” issue is, in my view, a red herring tout court, and a pernicious one for multiple reasons: it creates a false sense that a “rational” version of the series would somehow automatically be narratively and perhaps ideologically superior, it betrays a habit of baselessly expecting that the series will eventually provide “explanations” rather than accepting that it is set in a stupefying universe, and it distracts the viewer from the analysis of religious belief in which, according to the series’ own creators, Yellowjackets is engaged:
I think if you are a spiritual person on any level, or had ever considered or wrestled with spiritual questions, something else to throw into the stew here is that there is an experience or phenomenology of like belief in spiritual experience. There is an expansive quality to it that perhaps you’ve felt in religious ceremony or looking at the Grand Canyon or an art or piece of music (sic), or being with family. However you’ve gotten it, I think we all have a kernel of that experience. So on the one hand, yes, something that expands this feeling seems great. But then there is all the tragedy and the times that it is elusive or completely unhelpful to you. So if you’re going to have a show that in some sense is trying to explore these elements of faith and spiritual experience, if you’re not also going to have the moments where those things are failures or useless, then you’re really not having a fair conversation.[2]
So much for the “supernatural or rational?” non-issue; the program is (in part) about religion, and the program is not a proselytization tool. What of cannibalism?
Discussing the evil eye, in which some of my own relatives grew up believing in the Italian-American community of the 1950s and 1960s, Sam Migliore writes that belief is part of a “language of distress.” “First,” that is, “[believing in the evil eye] provides people with a means by which they can identify, explain, and communicate specific experiences to significant others. Second, it provides people with a means by which they can take action when confronted by misfortune.”[3] The Yellowjackets take action when confronted by misfortune in many ways, but, as is well-known and as is one of the main draws of the series, eventually they take action by eating people. This action, as with Migliore’s evil eye curatives, they connect to and situate within the magical or religious thinking that the show depicts (and that the show refuses to condemn).
A great deal of research about the cultural and mediatic history of cannibalism went into the show’s development and writing. Some of this research, when performed in a Christian country by people interested in telling a story that touches on spiritual concerns,[4] is inevitably going to involve the Eucharist. Direct, clearly communicated Eucharistic imagery in the show is surprisingly sparse (especially given that there are major characters to whom religion in general and Christianity in particular are very important), but it is present at two key moments in the first episode of the second season, which are also the chronologically first cannibalistic acts to take place. At the beginning of the episode Lottie Matthews performs a series of protective rituals over Natalie Scatorccio and Travis Martinez—Nat calls them “Wicca bullshit”—before they go on a winter hunting expedition; one ritual has her make them drink her diluted blood, a finger pricked and allowed to drip into hot water or tisane. At the end of the episode Shauna Shipman, grieving her best friend Jackie Taylor (whose death in the last episode of the first season Shauna feels she caused), furtively eats a small, roundish piece of her ear in a moment whose visuals are immediately familiar to people who regularly attend Mass.[5] The symbolic connection is compounded by further connections that have already been established between Shauna and Roman Catholicism. According to Jackie, she “tried to become Catholic” at some point in the past (“I liked the saints; they were all so tragic,” Shauna says),[6] and Shauna reveres Jackie herself in ways explicitly analogized with devotion to a saint, even decades after adoring/consuming her bodily.[7]
Catholicism has a long history of attempting and failing to “beat the cannibalism allegations” regarding the Eucharist, and an almost-as-long history of deep ambivalence about the Wilderness topos. As Fumagalli, among others, has pointed out,[8] for the bulk of the religion’s history, remote areas were generally seen not as spiritually nourishing or closer to God, but as pernicious because deprived of the “civilizing” aspect of the Church’s mission in the world. This is difficult to understand today; the Romantic movement changed the typical Western conception of the relationship between “wilderness” and the divine so utterly that the previous way of looking at it now seems alien, almost incomprehensible. Even consciously medieval-influenced twentieth-century writers, first and foremost Tolkien, struggle to replicate the medieval worldview on this point.[9] Yet in the medieval and even early modern Christian mind, it was important, obvious, and only dubiously countervailed by the experiences of hermits and desert saints. As Belden C. Lane puts it in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, “[t]hroughout much of the history of Western culture, mountains have been viewed as physically threatening, aesthetically distasteful, even morally reprehensible”; thus “fascination with mountain terrain is a relatively recently development in Western thought,” earlier writers having “scorned [them] as proud, insolent, sky-threatening, and aloof.”[10]
The historian Allan Greer, in his biography of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha—on whom more later in this essay—Mohawk Saint, discusses this at length in the Yellowjackets-esque setting of seventeenth-century Quebec, where French Catholic missionaries of the Jesuit order and indigenous Iroquoian and Algonquian cultural systems did ideological and spiritual battle. Of an episode in Kateri Tekakwitha’s life in which she maintained her religious practice as a Catholic convert during a long hunting expedition, Greer writes that:
The vignette featuring [Kateri] praying at her rustic chapel in the forest came to be the favorite image in modern versions of her life story; it seemed to epitomize all the most appealing qualities associated with the “Indian maiden” as an innocent woodland creature at one with nature. All the more reason to note that the seventeenth-century Jesuits attached a very different meaning to this scene. Chauchetière and Cholenec worried about the moral and religious dangers of long hunting trips, even though they recognized their economic necessity for the convert Iroquois. Not only did the hunt pose practical problems in their ministry in that it kept people physically removed from the mass and from the supervision of the missionaries, but it took Indian neophytes into a wild environment with perilous associations. For the original biographers of [Kateri] Tekakwitha, space had moral meaning: the Christian village at Sault St. Louis, together with the fields that surrounded it, was good, whereas the forest was almost entirely evil, the dark haunt of demons and pagan savages. Thus, far from “communing with nature” in her woodland oratory, they saw [Kateri] doing her best to commune with civilization.[11]
On this point Yellowjackets is closer to the medieval Christian worldview than are most expressly Christian modern works of art. The two characters to die first in the Wilderness experience, not counting the initial plane crash, are both associated with the norms of the parent society on the urban or suburban, secular or conventionally Christian or Jewish, affluent East Coast of the United States. Laura Lee has a strong and mostly-conventional Evangelical Christian religiosity, and Jackie Taylor maintains her priorities about things like interpersonal hierarchy and who is having sex with whom long after the others have ceased to care. The Wilderness evidently does not need this. Yet it is Laura Lee who is Lottie’s first and most devoted confidante and Laura Lee whose baptism of Lottie backfires and sets Lottie down the path to starting the group’s later cultic practices;[12] it is Jackie whose earthly remains are the stuff of Shauna’s first act of cannibalism and, an episode later, the first full-fledged cannibalistic feast.[13] There is a series of motifs being put together here—a snowbound cabin; w/Wilderness; Canada; cannibalism; religion; the atavistic or uncivilized or “primal”—that recalls an episode in the earliest biographies of Kateri Tekakwitha. In this incident, Kateri’s closest friend, Wari Teres Tegaiaguenta, is a member of a group that resorts to cannibalism during a disastrous winter hunting expedition, guilt over which inspires her to adopt extreme ascetic practices to which she then introduces Kateri. The cannibalism motif informs their religious practice in a way that is technically separate from but unavoidably juxtaposed with the Eucharist, and untamed forest is again a place of extreme physical and spiritual danger.[14]
In other aspects of Yellowjackets, as well as in Laura Lee’s and Jackie’s deaths, the Christian elements of the religious aesthetic and of the characters’ religious imaginary seem incongruous in the Wilderness topos. A piece of set design is, tellingly, a reversal, so to speak, of the attributes of St. Hubert, the patron of hunters. Hubert’s attributes include a stag with a crucifix between its antlers (and thus above its head), in reference to a vision that he is said to have had.[15] On an interior wall of the Yellowjackets cabin, however, there is a crucifix positioned below a stag’s head that has been mounted as a hunting trophy. Other reversals or parodies of well-known biblical and liturgical narratives and images abound, from Lottie’s chrismation with blood in the episode “Blood Hive”[16] to the Exodus 16-inspired “suicide on our roof” of a clutter of starlings in the episode “Digestif.”[17] These kinds of reversals and parodies are, in orthodox Christian belief, associated with the demonic, which at several points in Yellowjackets lends substance to an otherwise somewhat tendentious-seeming interpretation that the supernatural force in the Wilderness is a demon (despite various characters’ insistence that “It” is neutral or amoral rather than wicked).
The demonic overtones interact somewhat uncomfortably—we might even say problematically—with the elements of the show’s look and feel that are most obviously influenced by Native American religion and culture. The “Antler Queen,” for instance, a polysemous symbol of the girls’ cult that is sometimes the person leading the group and sometimes a separate being sort of like an avatar or paraclete of the Wilderness/It, wears a crown of deer antlers like those worn historically by Iroquois political leaders.[18] Lottie, the first person to don the antler crown in the episode “Doomcoming,”[19] has, as mentioned above, at least two relationships with blonde white characters whom the narrative generally favors over her, morally speaking. (It must be acknowledged, however, that, subtext aside, the question of Laura Lee’s or Nat’s moral superiority over Lottie is one in which the show as scripted says it is not interested; these are, among other things, characters who love and are loved by Lottie on what is supposed to be a more or less even footing. The failure of writerly intent on this point seems to me to be an honest one.) The Antler Queen also conjures up specters of the pop-cultural wendigo, an appropriative and (according to many people) spiritually dangerous reperiodization of the folkloric Alqonquian cannibalistic monster of the same name; in mass media this being is typically depicted as a sort of stag-man, a portrayal especially popularized by the mid-2010s cannibalism-themed television series Hannibal. All of this is to say that juxtaposing Yellowjackets’s religious imagination with its preferred depiction and framing of cannibalism rapidly raises questions of cultural sensitivity vis-à-vis indigenous worldviews.
In a key storyline early in the show’s second season, Nat runs across a large white moose on a hunting expedition, fails to shoot it, then, an episode later, finds its body half-immersed in a frozen-over lake. Efforts to haul the moose out of the lake prove unavailing as the group’s ropes break and it instead sinks to the bottom. The white moose too is an Algonquin religious and folkloric being, one much more benevolent than the wendigo; this is reflected by its positioning in Yellowjackets as a ray of hope, even though that hope is ultimately dashed. Particularly significant is that in the Algonquin culture in which the white moose plays the most important role, the Mi’kmaq of Maine and Atlantic Canada, it is a guardian spirit and a “messenger or link to the Creator.”[20] Several Native American people whom I know have told me personally that the white moose, among other things, leads hunters to food in the winter—exactly the situation in which Nat encounters it in the show. It is in this lake that the Yellowjackets eventually allow Javi Martinez, the second cannibalism victim, to drown, in a cruel parody of Mi’kmaq beliefs much like the cruel parodies of Christian beliefs elsewhere in the series. As Masuzawa points out,[21] to treat a religion similarly to Christianity is, in a primarily-Christian intellectual landscape, to ratify and validate it as worth taking seriously; looked at this way, the sequence of events surrounding the white moose validates indigenous North American religion more than anything else in the show.
The white moose would, had the Yellowjackets successfully hauled it out of the lake and consumed it, have obviated the real or perceived need to engage in the ritual cannibalization of Javi five episodes later. It is possible that it falls through the ice as a way of taunting them and driving them further into despair, but I, and much of the show’s fandom, prefer to see the moose as a more positive figure. This turns its loss in the lake into an instance of power struggle between multiple forces within the Wilderness, and thus turns the Wilderness itself into a morally and spiritually contested space. In this context we might note that, early in the development of the Lottie-focused Wilderness cult, Lottie refers to “the ancient gods,” only shifting to the singular “It”—“we hear the Wilderness and It hears us”—later on. A reading that sees the moose positively—the way a Mi’kmaq audience would see it—would have it that Lottie got it right the first time, and that the Wilderness is a stage on which sacred dramas play out, dramas whose main characters might be very different from the main characters of Yellowjackets-the-television-series.
Yet, sacred dramas aside, the this-worldly, human concerns of the characters we follow in the show generally see reverence for or deference to the Wilderness topos functioning in a socially corrosive way. It does not always corrode the microsociety that the Yellowjackets themselves build in the woods—quite the contrary; important moments like Taissa and Van coming out as lesbians in “Doomcoming” or Shauna barely surviving childbirth in “Qui” are made emotionally and relationally easier, if anything, by taking place in the new society and according to the new cultural practices. It does, however, corrode the connections that most characters seek to maintain with the parent society. (There are a few exceptions, characters who do not seem to miss anything about their pre-crash lives and might even actively prefer the Wilderness, and these are the characters who tend to become the diehard cultists in the show’s second season.) The stage of Yellowjackets is not one whose players can maintain at will investment in their backstage lives.
It should go without saying that in most situations the concerns of a suburban high school are going to be both more legible and more sympathetic than the concerns of a backwoods cannibal cult to most television audiences. Admittedly, with the sort of viewership that Yellowjackets has attracted, this hasn’t always been the case, but it does mean that we can’t ignore the associations between Wilderness, religion, violence, etc., nor even the (atypical and quite boldly articulated) connection that the show proposes between all of these things and femininity. Yellowjackets is a feminist series; it is also a series in which womanhood and women are somewhat horrifying. The same can be said of its relationship with rurality and atavism, and there is much less of a history of conceding this sort of point or seeing it as acceptable and empowering among indigenous and ruralist thinkers than among feminists.
What is one to make, then, of the questionable symbolic and aesthetic association between indigenous religion and violent, atavistic brutality? Two avenues come to mind for reparative reading of this admittedly troubling facet of Yellowjackets’s aesthetic schema. The first is for the viewer to determine that what appears to be presented as terrifying and despicable is in fact not, and that, like Melville in Chapter 57 of Moby-Dick,[22] the Yellowjackets writers are willing to entertain an astounding degree of relativism about what the characters are doing and then commend that relativism to the audience. This avenue has an intuitive appeal and at points is spelled out within the text. “When you were with those women you were free,” the Antler Queen tells Lottie in “Burial”;[23] “God is alive; magic is afoot,” the soundtrack (Buffy Ste-Marie interpreting Leonard Cohen) tells us two episodes later.[24] The viewer doesn’t have any immediate reason to doubt that this is partly the case—that, whatever else Yellowjackets’s Wilderness is, it is also an enchanted forest where the terrifying and transgressive contains or points to the sublime.
A second avenue might be to look at the show through a more conventional cultural or moral lens but conclude that this lens isn’t actually being inherently violated by the Wilderness topos. Put simply, in this reading, what produces the barbarity is not the look, feel, or Sitz im Leben of indigenous culture and indigenous religion themselves; it is how that is experienced and engaged with by interlopers from the cultivated world of end-of-history liberal suburbia. None of the human characters in Yellowjackets are actually from the Wilderness or from cultural groups that traditionally live there, and the most obviously malevolent supernatural agency in the series communicates in French, a colonial language par excellence in much of North America’s vast internal frontier.
As Margaret J. Leahey remarks in “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France,” French missionaries and traders in what is now Canada and parts of the Northern United States had little interest in forcing, encouraging, or even teaching Native peoples to speak French; indeed, many of them preferred to learn Native American languages instead despite the extreme difficulty of doing so as adults from a Romance starting position.[25] Kateri Tekakwitha likely understood more Latin than French, because all the Frenchmen she ever met would have spoken primarily Mohawk outside Mass and Latin in Mass. Thus early in the settlement and colonization process French was a white man’s language in ways that English and Spanish ceased to be much sooner. To this day French is somewhat racialized (as “white”) within Canada; when primarily Anglophone First Nations voters helped sink the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, Premier Jacques Parizeau infamously blamed “l’argent pis des votes ethniques” (“money and the ethnic vote”) for the loss. It’s difficult to say whether the writers of Yellowjackets are expressly aware of this history; as Americans it is likelier that many of them tend to associate the French language with Canadianness writ large.[26] Nevertheless, it provides a potential resource for interpreting the horrors of the Wilderness as those of imperialism rather than those of indigeneity.
But let’s set indigeneity and imperialism aside and think, on a human level, on the things the characters in this show do to one another. The show connects brutality and survival in ways that are less Golding than London or even Nietzsche; the “freedom” in “when you were with those women you were free” bears more than a whiff of Also Sprach Zarathustra’s madman or Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand, that nineteenth-century Will that baptizes harpoons “non…in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.”[27] I don’t think this is by any means a moral problem with the show, since the demonic can’t be honestly depicted without depicting why some people find it appealing, but it does mean that Yellowjackets is a story that contains Tolkienian “pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”[28] The view of the Wilderness’s ominous quality as solely an issue of colonial domination would seem to run into a wall here.
I would further submit a third, synthesized avenue of understanding, which has become my own preferred reading of the show. As seen above in the discussion of Mi’kmaq beliefs, we can support an elevated moral and aesthetic reading of the Wilderness even if there is something genuinely foul and evil out there too—even if, so to speak, the Francophone demon as well as the white moose is a going concern with real power over the enchanted woods. Lane, moving on to the subject of deserts from the discussion of mountains quoted above, introduces an interesting and illustrative nuance, a nuance that itself produces much of the Christian spiritual tradition and grounds that tradition ecologically.
In a similar way, deserts have been viewed with fear and contempt as the snare of the devil, the abode of dragons, or the lair of the lawless. As wilderness, wüste, waste, the desert becomes the haunt of demons—at best a “negative landscape” or “realm of abstraction,” located outside of the ordinary sphere of existence, susceptible only to things transcendent. In early Christian tradition, the desert was perceived ambiguously, usually as an unfriendly, intimidating domain; but for those able to endure its purifying adversity, an image also of paradise.[29]
Looked at with this stereoscopic spiritual and moral vision, Yellowjackets seems to share concerns not so much with Lord of the Flies or even with The Call of the Wild as with Dune. Perhaps, much like Arrakis, God created the Wilderness to train the faithful.[30]
Yellowjackets on a human level is almost certainly meant to communicate a studied and methodologically “correct” agnosticism about not only the existence of God (or the Wilderness) but the existence of any religious “knowledge” as such. Yet resources within the text for a theological reading of the show exist, and are not present within the text necessarily merely by accident.
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[1] Might that “serendipity” or “fate” itself be viewed as an “author,” depending on the religious beliefs of the interpreter?
[2] Bart Nickerson, quoted in Jackie Strause, “‘Yellowjackets’ Bosses Explain Shocking Episode and “Perversely Celebratory” Final Scene,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2023.
[3] Sam Migliore, Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 49-50.
[4] See the above block quote for a denomination of the show as “spiritual” rather than “supernatural.” The narrative is interested in epistemology to an unusual extent; much of the second season, in both timelines, involves the characters factionalizing based on degree of receptiveness to mystical experience, as opposed to more obvious cleavages such as race, class, sexual orientation, amount of practical survival prowess, or on-paper religious background.
[5] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 1, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired March 26, 2023, Showtime.
[6] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Karyn Kusama, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired November 21, 2021, Showtime.
[7] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 6, “Saints,” directed by Billie Woodruff, written by Chantelle M. Wells, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 19, 2021, Showtime.
[8] Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear: Perceptions of Nature and the City in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1994).
[9] The degree and suddenness of the change in attitudes can be and has been, however, exaggerated. Martin Korenjak, “Why Mountains Matter: Early Modern Roots of a Modern Notion.” Renaissance Quarterly vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 179-219.
[10] Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42.
[11] Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131. Greer favors the French form “Catherine” over the Mohawk form “Kateri,” for various reasons to which I am sympathetic but which I have made a decision against; thus in quoting him I render “Catherine” as “[Kateri]” to maintain consistency with the rest of my text.
[12] Op. cit., “Saints.” The character is always referred to and addressed as “Laura Lee,” either a double-barreled given name, like the Mary Graces and Mary Katherines that many families have, or a full name the use of which is ubiquitous among the other characters, like Charlie Brown or Mary Poppins.
[13] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 2, “Edible Complex,” directed by Ben Semanoff, written by Jonathan Lisco, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 2, 2023, Showtime.
[14] Op. cit., Greer, 182-184. Cf. footnote 8 for Greer’s “Marie-Thérèse” vs. my “Wari Teres.”
[15] The legend appears in most older reference works on Catholic saints and is amply attested in art, heraldry, and even alcohol labels; that of the liqueur Jägermeister will be the most familiar depiction of St. Hubert’s stag to many readers of this essay.
[16] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 5, “Blood Hive,” directed by Eva Sørhaug, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired December 12, 2021, Showtime.
[17] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 3, “Digestif,” directed by Jeffrey W. Byrd, written by Sarah L. Thompson and Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, and Liv Hewson, aired April 9, 2023, Showtime.
[18] William N. Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” in The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League, ed. Francis Jennings (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 17.
[19] Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 9, “Doomcoming,” directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, written by Ameni Rozsa and Sarah L. Thompson, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, and Ella Purnell, aired January 9, 2022, Showtime.
[20] Chief Bob Gloade, quoted in Diana Hall, “Hunters spark outrage after killing ‘spirit moose’ on Cape Breton Highlands trip,” National Post, October 8, 2013.
[21] Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Masuzawa does not condone or approve of this; nevertheless, she makes a strong case that this is, descriptively, how this works in Western intellectual and artistic cultures, and thus, for our purposes, that this is a case of Yellowjackets taking its implications seriously.
[22] 278-280 in my Collins Classics edition. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Collins Classics, 2011).
[23] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 7, “Burial,” directed by Anya Adams, written by Rich Monahan and Liz Phang, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 14, 2023, Showtime.
[24] Yellowjackets, season 2, episode 9, “Storytelling,” directed by Karyn Kusama, written by Ameni Rozsa, featuring Melanie Lynskey, Sophie Nélisse, Tawny Cypress, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Christina Ricci, Samantha Hanratty, Juliette Lewis, Sophie Thatcher, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, and Liv Hewson, aired May 28, 2023, Showtime. We might note that the choice of song also reinforces the series’ connection to Kateri Tekakwitha in that Cohen’s lyrics are taken from Beautiful Losers, a novel that he wrote as a young man in which she is one of the main characters.
[25] Maragret J. Leahey, “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’ Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-112.
[26] With all that Canadianness tends to imply to Americans—remoteness, coldness, “nordicity” in general, perhaps a more collectivist political culture, a history assumed to be without the series of enormously violent inflection points (Revolutionary War, Civil War, etc.) that characterizes the United States’ history.
[27] Op. cit., Melville, 501.
[28] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. In The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 33.
[29] Op. cit., Lane, 43. This passage in Lane goes on to cite, in its own notes, Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, which, while beyond the scope of this essay, has immediate areas of relevance to Yellowjackets as well.
[30] This Herbertian bon mot appears most prominently on 501 in my 2010 Ace Books edition.
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