Lily Gladstone & Erica Tremblay On Fancy Dance & Hollywood’s Reluctance To Tell Native American Stories

Lily Gladstone has had a hell of a year. Her role as Mollie Kyle in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon earned the star several accolades, including being the first Native American to win the Golden Globe for Best Actress, as well as a historic Oscar nomination. Of Piegan Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, Gladstone has already made a name for herself in taking Native American women's stories to the mainstream — and she's about to do it again with her new flick, Fancy Dance.

The new film from Erica Tremblay stars Gladstone as Jax, a queer Native woman who takes care of her niece Roki (newcomer Isabel DeRoy-Olson) after her sister (and Roki's mother) goes missing. As Jax takes on a failed justice system in the search for her sister, she also juggles her anguish with taking care of Roki and helping her prepare for an upcoming powwow — a gathering of Native American people dancing, singing, and honouring their culture.

For Gladstone, the release of Fancy Dance is perfectly timed and arrives a year after filming her previous work on Killers of the Flower Moon. "It's been a wild year," Gladstone tells Refinery29 Australia. "I am so pleased that on the other side of this wild year that I've had, part of that wild year was people's focus got pulled away from where it usually sits in a narrative."

For the award-winning actor, Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon and Tremblay's Fancy Dance are very much in tandem, exploring two sides (and perspectives) of the same coin. "If you see the two in tandem, it really feels like they go together," they say. While Scorsese's Killers was criticised for focusing far too much on the violent men in the real-life story of Mollie Kyle, Fancy Dance is much more of a celebration of women, motherhood, and community, perhaps largely due in part to the fact that it's written and directed by a Native woman. However, Gladstone says that Killers popularity has ultimately shown big studios that audiences are hungry for more stories about Native women.

"Killers of the Flower Moon gave audiences an opportunity to really fall in love with Indigenous women in a way that you rarely see or especially in Hollywood, have maybe never seen. I feel like audiences who leaned so much into Mollie, into her sisters and into her community, were hungry for more of that," Gladstone says. "I think audiences were hungry for something like Fancy Dance."

Gladstone explains that while each film looks at two different cultures and tribes, it centres the same land (and at times, the films share the same filming locations). However more than that, both films have a sobering undertone weaved in them about the state of missing and murdered Indigenous people.

While Killers is set in 1920s Oklahoma and Fancy Dance in modern-day Oklahoma, for Gladstone, the fact that there are so many similarities between the films show that not much has changed. "It's the same place and the same history — nothing has changed really in a 100-year period," Gladstone says. "This epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples has gone nowhere since contact, since colonialism. Killers of the Flower Moon detailed a history that was an extension of that and we see that with Fancy Dance, it hasn't gone anywhere."

The tragic loss of Indigenous women is not confined to specific regions and can be seen in colonised countries around the world. In the United States, 5,712 Native women were reported missing in 2016. In Canada, Indigenous women were found to be four times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be victims of violence — and made up 16% of all female homicide victims and 11% of missing women. And here in Australia, a 2022 report found that First Nations women face murder rates up to 12 times the national average. These statistics are likely even higher due to systemic deficiencies, racial biases within justice systems and a lack of resourcing.

It's therefore a big feat for a film of this magnitude — boosted by an Oscar-nominated actress — to hit global screens, calling for greater attention to the epidemic. For Erica Tremblay, this will be her directorial debut. A Native American writer from the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, she's best known for her work on Reservation Dogs. But Fancy Dance, which she has both written and directed, is her biggest achievement to date.

However, despite the brand power of Gladstone and the increasing need to platform the story of missing and murdered Indigenous women, the process of acquiring the film hasn't been an easy task. Premiering at Sundance Festival in 2023, it wasn't for another year that the film would finally be acquired by a distribution company — Apple TV+. Tremblay says that there's still a hesitancy for big studios to take on Native stories.

"I think anytime you're making a story that is about a community and is by people that you don't see represented in Hollywood, it's going to be difficult. It's difficult for these studios and large companies to take risks," Tremblay tells us.

"It was difficult all along the way to convince people to take a risk on a story about a queer Native woman and her niece," Tremblay says. "There's no film to point to to say hey, this is going to work — but now there is. Now there is a story about a queer Native woman and her niece that is a success story and is going to be globally released and seen by the world."

The characters you find in Fancy Dance, for example, Gladstone's character, Jax — a queer Native woman, are not the typical types you see in Hollywood films, either, which may have also made it hard to sell to big studios. But this is one of the things Gladstone loved most about the film: "I love that the two of us are characters that you're not used to seeing in Indigenous narratives," she says. "It's an introduction in a way that other people aren't used to seeing."

For Tremblay, one of the hardest parts of the process lay in having big studios understand the vision of films like this, especially with limited predecessors. "It's a challenge sometimes to get people to see the vision, to recognise the importance of the voice, but you just keep knocking on doors and telling strong stories," Tremblay says. "Hopefully, the success of things like Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds and Frybread Face and Me and Fancy Dance, will start a cannon or add to an existing cannon of Native films and we can see more and more of them."

Similarly, Gladstone hopes that her involvement in the project will open doors for other Indigenous talent to grace our screens, such as newcomer Isabel DeRoy-Olson. "I'm really thrilled that the year that I've had really creates space and opens the door for the world to fall in love with Isabel and to bring more Indigenous talent and these beautiful Indigenous women on screen," she says.

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