Los Angeles is home to a sizable urban indigenous community after the U.S. federal government in the 1950s launched its Native American Relocation Program that led American Indians to leave rural reservations for what they hoped would be better jobs and lives in major cities.
And Canadian indigenous director Marie Clements, with her drama How We Stand, shows how that promise of relocation from Oklahoma to Los Angeles ended in tragedy for a fictional single mother, Angela, played by Cara Jade Myers, and her three daughters, impacted by the racism, sexism and violence of historical U.S. government policies that sought the cultural eradication of native Indians.
“It’s such an epic story, as universally we all want to go somewhere just to have a new beginning, to create a better future for our children and our families,” Clements tells The Hollywood Reporter ahead of her film’s Sept. 13 world premiere at TIFF. That simple dream became a nightmare of extreme poverty and trauma in How We Stand, which also stars in the role of the three sisters: Amber Midthunder as Jessie, Alyssa Wapanatâhk as Miranda and Isabel DeRoy-Olson as Janey.
Having taken shelter in a native American community in “the tombs,” or the cemented riverways of Los Angeles, violent tragedy strikes Angela, which leads to her daughters becoming separated and sent down divergent paths in life before they are reunited in 1970s LA during a dramatic flood scene.
Clements’ How We Stand movie adapts her earlier one-woman stage play, Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, which was originally commissioned by a Native Voices program at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. While her drama uses magical realism and indigenous storytelling traditions to portray the cultural destruction of Indigenous peoples through government resettlement policies, Clements does not hesitate to make her audience uncomfortable as she reframes authorized American history.
“Our (indigenous) history is uncomfortable and I do think the truth is uncomfortable and witnessing that truth is uncomfortable if you don’t know it. And there’s something powerful in seeing our experiences reflected on screen,” she adds. Clements in How We Stand effectively takes aim at the historical Vanishing Indian myth, where indigenous peoples were thought by oppressors in the U.S. and Canada to be destined to fade away, as if by magic.
“Vanishing for indigenous people is not magical. It’s sometimes very violent and it has been done by government policies that aren’t magical,” she argues. After the sisters grow up in separate foster homes, Clement has them reappear in 1970s Los Angeles as young women, yet still beset by historical injustices.
Activist Miranda finds herself acting on the set of a Wild West movie that parodies native Indians, a distressed Janey faces authorities who misread her trauma, and Jessie is now a doctor alongside her husband in a community clinic that participates in the mass sterilization of indigenous women.
“I think it’s a great reminder for us to look at history and to be accountable for decisions that aren’t personally our own, but that represent our societies,” Clements says of a dramatic climax for her movie where the sisters have an emotional reunion.
How We Stand, which also stars Darren Mann, Eric Johnson, Gary Farmer, Gil Bellows, Mary Walsh, Evan Adams and Tonantzin Carmelo, for Clements pays homage to 1970s political activist movements for change that still resonate today. “I always find it just an outrageously fascinating decade, and I kind of wish I was fully there, because there were so many calls for human rights, women’s rights, black rights, indigenous rights and everything was brewing,” Clements argues.
While also writing the screenplay for How We Stand, Clements produced the indie drama with Christine Haebler, Trish Dolman (who also produced Clements’ epic Canadian TV series Bones of Crow) and Steven Thibault. Cara Jade Myers, Mark Slone and Kirk D’Amico share executive producer credits.
The Toronto Film Festival runs Sept. 10-20.