Last week, I finished a movie called Fancy Dance. I really loved the Indigenous actress, Lily Gladstone, in the film Killers of the Flower Moon, so when I saw the trailer for this movie, which you can find on Apple TV, I was so excited. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily plays a woman named Mollie Burkhart, who in real life was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhart. Ernest and his uncle plotted the murders of several wealthy Indigenous people who live in Osage County in Oklahoma. Ernest is a chauffeur for Mollie, and he falls in love with her. They marry and have a child together. But Mollie finds out that members of her family and members of the Osage Nation are being murdered at alarming rates in the most gruesome disturbing ways, and Ernest also poisons her under the guise that she needs insulin shots for her diabetes. I had to pause the film a few times because I didn’t know about the Osage Murders and hadn’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon beforehand, so the film was really harrowing to watch, and each time I saw an Indigenous person get brutally murdered in the film, I would start crying. I finally was able to finish the film, but it stuck with me for a very long time, and thinking about the movie still gives me goosebumps, as it was intended to do because watching intergenerational racial trauma on screen depicted in the most realistic way is never easy to stomach, especially if your high school history textbooks never went into depth about this dark part of American history.
On Tuesday of last week, it was Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and I wanted to watch a movie that had Indigenous actors in it. Even though Killers of the Flower Moon blew me away, I don’t have the stomach to watch it again unfortunately, so that’s why I was really glad to have heard about Fancy Dance. The trailer was amazing, and thankfully I was able to watch it on Apple TV. Honestly, after watching the movie, it reminds me that we need more Indigenous voices in Hollywood. Lily Gladstone is going to pave the way for many more Indigenous actors and actresses to produce and star in movies where Indigenous people’s experiences are represented authentically and accurately. I haven’t seen a lot of movies with representation of LGBTQ+ Indigenous people, so it was actually really cool that Jax (Lily Gladstone’s character) was able to be her queer self in Fancy Dance. There is a scene where she goes to a strip club and meets with one of the strippers who works there named Sapphire, and Sapphire and her make love with each other. Lily Gladstone in real life identifies as queer and goes by she/ they pronouns. She explained in an article on Salon that in a lot of Native languages they don’t have gendered pronouns, and while growing up on a Blackfeet reservation people were more accepting of gender fluidity than outside of the community. I don’t know a lot about the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people of Indigenous tribes, but as someone who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community and loves anything LGBTQIA+, reading this article about Lily’s pronouns was very affirming. Growing up, I didn’t know a lot of other queer people of color until I got to college, and I also didn’t know much about the LGBTQIA+ terminology and diverse sexual orientations and genders until I got to college, which was, for the most part, an affirming environment for LGBTQIA+ people (I only say “most part” because I only know my own experience. I can’t speak for the experiences of other queer students of color who attended the college.)
It was an incredible film, and Lily Gladstone was also one of the producers of the film. She plays the protagonist in the movie, named Jax. Jax is searching for her missing sister, Tawi, and because her sister is missing, Jax is letting her niece, Roki, stay with her until they find Tawi. Roki wants to participate in the upcoming powwow to honor her mother, who participated in the powwow. However, child protective services barges into Jax’s house and takes Roki away because Tawi is gone and did drugs when Roki was staying with her, and they don’t think Jax is a suitable guardian for Roki. Roki ends up staying with her grandfather, Frank, and her step-grandmother, and she doesn’t enjoy it. One night at dinner, Jax asks if she can take Roki to the powwow in Oklahoma City, but Frank and his wife don’t want her to do that because they don’t want to get in trouble with child protective services. However, Jax sneaks out and has Roki come with her so they can travel to the powwow together. JJ, who is Jax’s brother, is trying to help Jax find her missing sister, but Frank and his wife have issued a search warrant to find Roki. When Roki goes into a gas station to get some snacks, she sees on the TV screen her and Jax’s face, and the reporters accusing Jax of kidnapping Roki. Roki and Jax continue to travel to the powwow, doing their best to stay undercover.
I think one of the most painful scenes of the film was when Roki overhears Jax telling JJ that Roki’s mom isn’t going to be at the powwow. Roki thinks that her mother is going to be at the powwow, but JJ ends up searching for Tawi and one evening finds Tawi’s corpse in a lake. While they are traveling to the powwow, Roki stops to go into the gas station, and the cashier recognizes her from the photos on the TV showing Roki and Jax. Earlier in the movie, Roki takes a lady’s purse, which has a gun in it, and in the scene where the cashier recognizes her and is about to call the cops, she aims the gun at the cashier, threatening to shoot him if he calls the police on her and Jax. Jax is outside, wondering why Roki is taking so long, when suddenly she hears a loud gunshot from inside the gas station store. She rushes into the store and finds Roki holding the shotgun and shaking with the impact after she fired the gun, and the cashier face down in a pool of blood. Jax calls 911 to send the paramedics over (Roki had shot the man in the shoulder) and Jax and Roki both run through the cornfields to escape the police. When Jax tells Roki to come with her, Roki stays behind. When Jax asks her why she doesn’t want to come with her, Roki tells her that she overheard Jax telling JJ that Tawi (Roki’s mom) wasn’t going to be at the powwow, and it really hurt that Jax lied to her because up until then, Roki placed all of her trust in Jax. Now that she knows the truth, she feels she cannot trust Jax anymore and runs away towards the oncoming police sirens.
There are some rare moments of shared tender joy between Roki and Jax in the film. Roki gets her first period (she calls it her first moon) and not having any menstrual products, Jax cuts up one of the diapers in the lady’s bag and has Roki use it as a sanitary pad. They celebrate by going to a diner, and Jax lets Roki order whatever she wants. Roki orders strawberry pancakes, crepes, waffles and other breakfast dishes, and enjoys them. When Roki and Jax are leaving, a cop interrogates them about their whereabouts and has Roki come into his police car to ask her a few questions. I seriously thought that they were going to get caught, but Roki gives an anonymous name, and the police looks her up in the system and says that Roki and Jax are cleared and can go. While they are driving, Roki admits to Jax that her menstrual blood accidentally stained the seat of the policeman’s car, and they both laugh about it.
**This is a total digression, but I remember when I got my period at 13; I wasn’t super excited. Instead, I was pretty moody. I don’t even know how I could have vegan chocolate cake on my period that day, because normally if I eat desserts or consume sugar on my period, I get terrible menstrual cramps. It’s a bummer but until I go see a gynecologist about any underlying causes of period pain, I need to be mindful of how much sugar I eat on my period. I often take it for granted that I have a period now that I’m much older, but after reflecting on the scene where Roki gets her period, I remember how significant my first period was, not just for me but for my family. I was becoming a young woman, and my body was going through these new changes. I wasn’t just throwing up when I got the flu. I was throwing up whenever I was on my period because my cramps were so bad, and I would often need to miss school, work or my SGI Buddhist activities because I was in such terrible pain. I remember when I watched this ad from Hello Flo, and this teen girl is jealous because all her friends were getting their periods and she hadn’t yet. The girl puts ruby-red nail polish on a sanitary pad and shows it to her friends to prove she got her period. The mom finds the pad and even though she knows that the daughter is lying about being on her period, she plays along with it and tells the daughter she is throwing her a “first moon party” that celebrates her first period. The daughter is embarrassed when her grandpa and other people start to arrive to the first moon party, and the mom invents games for people like “Pin the Pad on the Period” and has period themed foods, like a period-red fondue fountain where people can dip their marshmallows in period-red fondue. The daughter tells her mom to stop it, but the mom shows her daughter that she got her a period starter kit and lets her daughter know that she knew about her putting nail polish on the sanitary pad. It’s a cute commercial, and it actually made me appreciate having a period. Even though it’s not fun and it’s painful, as I learn more about periods and reproductive health, I think it’s pretty cool that my body has this interesting function. Whether I’m going to have babies or not, I don’t know, but I’m just going to let my body do its thing for the time being until I hit menopause. **
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