The “genocide” of indigenous peoples “continues” in the United States, accuses the new indigenous film star Lily Gladstone, in a fiction film that borders on a documentary on the disappearance of a woman from an Oklahoma tribe.
Became internationally famous in 2023 for her role, which earned her an Oscar nomination, in Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese, Lily Gladstone is the centerpiece of Fancy Dance presented last year at the Sundance independent film festival, but only released Friday in a few American theaters.
Screened in preview this week in New York – where AFP met the team of indigenous director Erica Tremblay – the film will be broadcast via Apple TV+ from June 28.
For Lily Gladstone, the strength of this fiction which has everything of a documentary – written, directed, produced, performed almost exclusively by indigenous women – is to “reflect our needs as indigenous women, particularly in the face of ‘epidemic of disappearances and murders of indigenous people’.
For the 37-year-old actress from the Blackfeet reservation in Montana (northwest), these never-solved disappearances and homicides are nothing less than the “genocide” of indigenous peoples which “continues” in the United States since the arrival of the first European settlers in the 16th centurye and XVIIe centuries.
Alone and poor woman
In Fancy Dancewhich she also produced, Lily Gladstone plays Jax, a single and poor woman, a member of the Seneca-Cayuga nation in Oklahoma (south) – one of the descendant tribes of the Iroquois peoples – and whose sister has disappeared.
Faced with the indifference of the federal police (FBI), and the lack of investigative means from her reserve police officer brother (played by Ryan Begay), Jax sets out in search of her sister, helped by her younger brother. niece (Isabel Deroy-Olson) who hopes to reunite with her mother for a big powwow, a traditional gathering of First Nations.
In the state of Oregon (northwest), these cases of disappearances of indigenous women were elevated to “emergency” status in an official report in 2019.
But more than four years later, progress in the investigations remains “limited”, the American investigative journal denounced last week. InvestigateWest.
American federal and regional authorities have become aware over the last ten years of the disproportionate number of disappearances and murders of indigenous people, particularly women, underlines this investigative media established in Seattle, in the state of Washington (northwest). ).
Using official estimates, InvestigateWest argues that across the country, “thousands” of cases of missing or killed indigenous people remain unsolved.
And for women aged 1 to 45, homicide is one of the leading causes of death.
Homicides of indigenous women
Documentary filmmaker Erica Tremblay, 44, a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation and whose Fancy Dance is the first fiction, is also alarmed by the fact that “the United States is currently experiencing an epidemic of disappearances and murders of indigenous people”.
“A genocide only stops if it achieves its objective or if we put an end to it,” she analyzes.
Erica Tremblay also denounces a “genocide still in progress in America today (but which) we do not talk about”, in particular because of the “jurisdictional” incapacity of indigenous nations to “pursue these crimes”.
And, Lily Gladstone proclaims, “the situation will not improve until these jurisdictional gaps are filled, sovereignty is restored and Aboriginal people are in a position (…) to take back (their) land”.
The young actress Isabel Deroy-Olson is delighted with “what Fancy Dance done so well: telling a story so real.
“It’s a work of fiction, but it’s so true for our communities here in North America,” she whispers, smiling.
