Fancy Dance (2023), Written by Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise, Director Erica Tremblay.

Indians used to be the bad guys in movies. Whooping and swooping on peaceable white folk that were trying to murder them and steal their land. Familiar tropes such as the dumb blonde President that is also an insurrectionist, draft dodging, tax dodging, rapist—grab them by the pussy and friend of Jeffrey Epstein and Putin, kinda guy—are easily overused.

A sympathetic look at the Seneca–Cayuga people and their allotted homeland of the Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. No American based studio would make this type of film now.

Chekov’s gun is loaded metaphorically and literally for the leading characters. (“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.”)

Jax (Lily Gladstone) acts as a little mother to her thirteen-year-old niece Roki after her sister Tawi goes missing. She investigating her disappearance, while fearing the worst and trying to keep a roof over their head by whatever means are necessary including stealing stuff from rich white folk.

Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) offers a child-eyed innocence. She’s sure her mum will be there for her when they go to the PowWow in Oklahoma City in a few weeks. She’s sure they’ll dance together. One of the dances is for those woman that have went missing or been murdered that year. I guess there’s an inherent warning (and not just from history) for any young girl to heed, and every step they take.

Nor does she truly understand when child protective services threaten to take her away, they can and will. Because for her  moral right and goodness are conflated into black and white. They suggest a world in which Jax is her real mother, trumps everything else. And she’s brought her up in their house and it seems stupid and mean and impossible that somebody, outside their home, would take her away.

Roki steals a gun from a white woman in a changing room. It’s not Chekov’s gun, but we know what to expect.

Jax also knows to expect harassment and disbelief when she’s outside the reservation. It’s been government policy since the sixteen century, with genocide, rape and re-education liberally thrown in. When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asked for her ID she has something to hide other than being an indigenous American that should be asking for his ID and threatening to deport him back to wherever his forefathers came from a few generations ago. She’d made the innate mistake of not being born white and wealthy. Unforgiveable. But she knows not to make a song and dance about it. Terrible last line (well, penultimate line), terrible title, but good film.

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Notes.