Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone is pleased that indigenous people are getting better representation on the silver screen, including in her new film Fancy Dance, but said there is an “ongoing genocide” of Native Americans that must be addressed.
Gladstone, 37, earned critical acclaim for her turn as an Osage woman locked in a duplicitous marriage to a murderous white husband in last year’s true crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon from director Martin Scorsese.
She is now starring in Fancy Dance, about the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous people in the US, most of them women.
Photo: AP
The film — which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, but is now hitting a limited number of theaters this month, and is streaming on Apple TV+ from Friday — is a work of fiction but feels like a documentary.
She says the film’s strength is in showcasing “the needs that we have as indigenous women, especially in the face of epidemics like missing murdered indigenous people” and children being placed in foster care with non-native families.
“Both are tied to an ongoing genocide in different ways,” Gladstone — who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage and grew up on a reservation in Montana — said at the film’s premiere this week in New York.
In Fancy Dance, Gladstone plays Jax, a single, poor woman on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma whose sister disappears, leaving her to care for her niece Roki.
Faced with the FBI’s indifference and the lack of resources available to her brother, a police officer on the reservation, Jax tries to find her sister herself and ultimately hits the road with Roki, who hopes to find her mother at a huge powwow ceremony.
Similar cases have made headlines in the past few years. In the state of Oregon, the disappearances of indigenous women were deemed an “emergency” in 2019 in official reports, but more than four years later, not much progress has been made, independent outlet InvestigateWest has said.
Federal and local authorities have become increasingly aware of the disproportionate number of indigenous women who have been killed or gone missing in the past few years, InvestigateWest said.
On the small screen, a handful of television shows have addressed the issue, including Alaska Daily, starring Hilary Swank, and the most recent season of HBO’s anthology series True Detective starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.
Fancy Dance takes a stark look at how indigenous women navigate a world and a justice system that often fails them.
Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who is making her fiction feature debut with Fancy Dance, is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation. She also worries about the epidemic of murders and disappearances.
“As an indigenous person, I can’t go online without being, you know, without seeing a missing poster, without people, like, looking for someone who is missing,” Tremblay said at the premiere.
“Then you go outside of non-native spaces and people have no idea that this is happening and going on,” she said.
InvestigateWest, citing official estimates, has put the number of unsolved cases of indigenous people missing or murdered across the US in the thousands.
For indigenous women under the age of 45, murder is one of the primary causes of death.
“Genocide doesn’t stop until it either accomplishes its goal or the bad actors stop it, and there’s an ongoing genocide that’s still happening in modern America that we aren’t talking about,” Tremblay said.
She said that because of complicated judicial procedures on Native lands, indigenous people cannot prosecute all crimes affecting them.
The situation cannot improve “until those jurisdictional loopholes close, until sovereignty is restored, until native people are in positions to really protect ourselves,” Gladstone said.
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