In Stephen King’s original It novel, the Losers Club learns that Pennywise isn’t just a creepy clown—it’s actually an evil cosmic entity who crash landed on Earth millennia ago.
The creature began hunting humans in the 18th century, but that begs the question: What exactly was it up to before then, and how could the Native communities in the area have missed it? HBO’s prequel series It: Welcome to Derry takes steps to right that plot hole in Episode 4, which gives Native characters a long overdue centrality in the larger King universe.
In a move that makes about as much sense as Jurassic World’s pitch to use velociraptors as war weapons, Welcome To Derry’s military bigwigs remain convinced that It is their key to winning the Cold War. Unfortunately for them, their only plan for pinpointing the monster’s location is digging into land all over Derry in search of mysterious, macguffin-esque beacons that they know surround it.
After noticing members of the fictional Native American Shokopiwah tribe watching his men work, General Francis Shaw (James Remar) decides to bring young Taniel—played by Joshua Odjick, also great in Francis Lawrence’s recent adaptation of King’s The Long Walk—in for questioning.
Unfortunately for Taniel, this isn’t a routine interrogation. Francis has ordered one of his men, a young, pre-The Shining Dick Halloran, to use his abilities to break into Taniel’s mind in hopes that he and his community know where the beacons are buried.
Once he’s inside his charge’s brain, Dick steps through a door into a memory of a young Taniel (Tres Garcia) speaking with his aunt Rose (Kimberly Guerrero). She also happens to be General Shaw’s one-time childhood sweetheart, but that interpersonal mess is beside the point here!
In this case, Taniel having “the talk” with his aunt means learning that a monster in Shokopiwah legend known as “The Galloo”—a.k.a. It—is real. Rose asks him to show her that he remembers the story, laying the groundwork for a lengthy, 10-minute-long tale’s worth of exposition.
As young Taniel tells us, The Galloo landed on Earth before the time of North America’s First People. When the creature arrived, the falling star that had acted as its cage broke open, giving it free reign over the local Western Wood. In response, the Shokopiwah people’s ancestors crafted a weapon from the star’s remains to protect them from The Galloo, which takes the form of a CGI deer with enormous, bloody antlers in this flashback.
For a while, the Shokopiwah lived in harmony with the monster by habitating and hunting outside of its territory. However, that careful balance came crashing down when European colonizers arrived and ignored the tribe’s warnings, becoming easy prey for The Galloo.
Eventually, It became so powerful due to its feasting that it was able to hunt outside of the Western Wood. Much to tween Necari’s (Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Kiawentiio) horror, her warrior mother Sesqui (Morningstar Angeline) concludes that the Shokopiwah have no choice but to leave their land for safety.
Despite one failed attempt at crafting more weapons from The Galloo’s star that resulted in the monster killing her mother, Necari and a group of friends eventually succeeded in doing so. They buried 13 of the star’s sacred shards, trapping it and resolving to secretly guard the pillars so that it could never break free. The episode ends with Taniel revealing to Dick that the pillars are in the tunnels under the old well, which—wouldn’t you know it!—lie within It’s notorious abandoned house on Neibolt Street.
The Shokopiwah people’s prominence in Welcome to Derry is a marked, welcome change from King’s novel and its subsequent adaptations. The fictional tribe, which is nonexistent in the It book, were invented for 2019’s It Chapter Two. In that film, the Shokopiwah’s presence is limited to one often-criticized scene, in which Derry historian Mike Hanlon visits them and participates in a vague “ceremony” in which he consumes a hallucinogenic root in order to witness It’s origin story.
More confoundingly, in King’s original tale, the Losers Club turn not to Native American locals, but to a far-flung ancient Himalayan ritual known as the Ritual of Chüd, to defeat Pennywise. While Welcome to Derry’s military plot line relying on macguffins still has a bit of a video game-y, fetch quest quality to it, connecting this lore to the town’s local Native American community makes a lot more sense than the book’s explanation ever did.
Welcome to Derry co-creator Andy Muschetti, who directed the recent It film duology, didn’t write the Shokopiwah scene in Chapter Two, but he is still very much attached to it (one can hope that his work on the show is a conscious effort to right the films’ racial insensitivities). This time around, the Welcome to Derry team prioritized cultural authenticity by working with both University of Maine professor and Penobscot Nation member John Bear Mitchell and the Wabanaki nation, an alliance of five Indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot.
“The Wabanaki nation has been there for thousands of years,” Guerrero recently told Polygon. “So it was really quite fascinating to go into Wabanaki history… It was a deep dive into something that was very culturally relevant and based on historical fact. And it’s not something that used to be, but it’s something that is and something that will be in the future.”
During the show’s New York Comic Con panel, Guerrero also pointed out that Necari and her friends form the “first Losers Club” of kids who take on It, foreshadowing the role that the novel’s characters will eventually play in defeating the creature for good.
“Undergirding so much of the Stephen King universe is this sense of, something is going on with the land,” she added. “The land remembers, even though we’ve forgotten… It was such a gift to get to play this Indigenous character that has all this ancestral knowledge that’s been passed down from generation to generation.”
Over and over in King’s oeuvre, the writer uses genre to explore how humans’ capacity for cruelty and violence foster can wreak both real and imagined horrors on their environment. His work, which is almost uniformly set in Maine, challenges common misconceptions that the Southern United States is the one true site of American bigotry.
Instead, King reckons thematically with the evils lurking within New England, the first region to be affected by foundational colonial violence. Native American characters and mythology are present in novels like Pet Sematary, Dreamweaver, and Firestarter, but the author has nonetheless faced criticism over the years for inaccurate and stereotypical depictions of Indigenous culture.
Welcome to Derry doesn’t erase decades of King’s fraught history with Native American representation, but four episodes in, it’s offering a long overdue fresh start.
