Lily Gladstone, the Native American actress revealed by the film Killers of the Flower Moonon the assassinations of Osage Indians in the 1920s, denounces in a new film the “genocide” of indigenous peoples, which “continues” in the United States.
The “genocide” of indigenous peoples “continues” in the United States, accuses the new Native American 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 Oscar-nominated role 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 Native American director Erica Tremblay – the film will be on 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 Native American women – is to “reflect our needs as Native women, particularly in the face of epidemics 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 United States since the arrival of the first European settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Alone and poor woman
In “Fancy Dance”, which 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 the 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 Native American nations and tribes.
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”, denounced the American investigative magazine InvestigateWest last week.
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 based in Seattle, in the state of Washington in the north. west.
Using official estimates, InvestigateWest suggests 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.
Native American homicides
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 Native American tribes and nations to “pursue these crimes”.
And, Lily Gladstone proclaims, “the situation will not improve until these jurisdictional gaps are filled, sovereignty is restored and indigenous 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.
