I was terrified quite a lot during the length of Missing from Fire Trail Road. Almost nothing seems to be done about the issue raised in Sabrina Van Tassel’s film that was featured as a world premiere in the Spotlight Documentary section of the 2024 Tribeca Festival. It is rather difficult to remember having come across the fact that many Indian women are unaccounted for each year in the United States, though the film clarifies the figures in a way that is absolute staggering.
A major part of the film narrates how Mary Ellen Johnson Davis went missing from the Tulalip Reservation on Thanksgiving of 2020. Her family members have not heard from her or known whether she is alive, but they still desire to believe he is alive. From the information she compiled about the friends she socialized with, she was able to ask questions that showed her the most unfortunate and haunting possibilities of what made her go missing. In fact, she and many more in the native community wanted to know why Davis went missing, and many more Native American women have never been heard of again, or their bodies were found, often in horrific ways like being stowed in an abandoned refrigerator.
Objective Depathologization, an activist and indigenous leader, Deborah Parker and U.S. Secretary to the Interior Deb Haaland are among those who would assist the viewers with the necessary context for the issue. Some of it relates to the way reservation policemen lack jurisdiction space over some particular types of criminal offenses. That, as one interviewee phrases it, creates a hot potato effect, with no one wanting to take responsibility. Therefore, reservations have turned out to be effective no governance areas where armed and violent men can afford to have their sexually dominant and homicidal fantasies without any legal repercussions.
Unfortunately, the Native people’s disdain and appalling attitude is not something that is unfamiliar. It is when Missing from Fire Trail Road in its remarkable last half brings on details that surround a moment in time the state prefers his people forget who in most instances prefers them to remain. Their objective now to tweak is the forcible removal of Native Children to transfer them into “boarding schools” bearing reclusive authoritative differences instituted by White America. These children received a near total denial of their culture and as a result, a generation of Indigenous people remained who spoke a language without knowing their nation. This film integrates the narrative of the abuse of women into the picture by tracing this pattern of discrimination against Native Americans throughout history.
Mary Ellen Johnson Davis’s family is looking for answers that they know are most probably not going to come and you share in the grief with them. You will also go through a sad sense of anger. Something has to change. We hope that Missing from Fire Trail Road facilitates a debate that enables changes to be made. The bitter truth is that all the women featured in this heart-breaking, important film know they may be the next victims – and the sad reality is that statistically some of them will be.
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