Oscar-nominated actress Lily Gladstone says she’s pleased to see better representation of Native Americans on screen, including in the new film “Fancy Dance,” but warns there is “an ongoing genocide of Native Americans” that must be addressed.
Gladstone, 37, won critical acclaim for her role as an Osage woman in a double marriage to her murderous white husband in last year’s Martin Scorsese crime blockbuster “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
She currently stars in “Fancy Dance,” a film about the epidemic of missing and murdered Native Americans, most of whom are women.
The film, which premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, will be released in limited theaters this month and available on Apple TV+ from June 28. It’s a work of fiction but with a documentary feel.
She said the film’s strengths lie in its portrayal of “the needs that we have as Indigenous women, particularly in the face of epidemics such as murdered and missing Indigenous people,” as well as children in foster care with non-Indigenous families.
“They’re both connected in different ways to the genocide that’s going on right now,” Gladstone, who is of Blackfoot and Nez Perce descent and grew up on a reservation in Montana, told AFP at the film’s New York premiere this week.
’emergency’
In “Fancy Dance,” Gladstone plays Jax, a poor single woman living on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma, whose sister disappears and leaves her in the care of her niece, Loki.
Faced with FBI indifference and a lack of resources available to his brother, a reservation police officer, Jax attempts to find his sister on his own, eventually going on the road with Loki, who hopes to find their mother at a massive powwow ceremony.
Similar incidents have been in the news in recent years.
In Oregon, missing Native American women were deemed a “emergency” in an official report in 2019, but more than four years later there has been no significant progress, according to the independent media outlet InvestigateWest.
According to InvestigateWest, federal and local authorities are increasingly aware of the disproportionate number of Indigenous women who have been murdered or gone missing in recent years.
On television, several shows have explored the issue, including “Alaska Daily,” starring Hilary Swank, and the most recent season of the HBO anthology series “True Detective,” starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.
Written, produced, directed and primarily starring indigenous women, Fancy Dance is a stark portrayal of how indigenous women navigate a world and justice system that often rejects them.
Thousands of murders remain unsolved
Documentary filmmaker Erica Tremblay, whose fiction feature debut Fancy Dance is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga tribe, is also concerned about the epidemic of murders and disappearances.
“As an Indigenous person, you can’t go online without seeing a missing person poster, you can’t go online without seeing people looking for missing people,” Tremblay, 44, told AFP at the premiere.
“And when you go outside of non-Indigenous territories, people have no idea that this is happening, that this is ongoing,” she said.
InvestigateWest, citing official estimates, puts the number of unsolved missing and murdered Native American cases across the United States at thousands.
And homicide is the leading cause of death for Indigenous women under the age of 45.
“Genocide doesn’t stop until it achieves its goal or the bad guys stop it, and there are genocides going on in modern-day America that we’re not talking about,” Tremblay said.
She noted that due to complex judicial procedures on indigenous lands, indigenous peoples are unable to prosecute all crimes that affect them.
Gladstone added that the situation would not improve “until jurisdictional loopholes are closed, sovereignty is restored and Indigenous peoples are truly in a position to defend themselves”.
Isabel DeRoy Olson, who plays Loki, said she was pleased that “Fancy Dance” tells “a very real story.”
“It’s a work of fiction, but it’s very true to our communities in North America, and that representation is very important,” she said.
