Missing from Fire Trail Road scared me significantly more than Van Tassel’s other film in which the idea of the world border exists. It was apparent, for example, from Vietnamese statistics in recent years that a high number of women were of disappeared out there, as the film tries to explain. Now that I think about it, it is rather bizarre to assume the filmmakers remind me of the hard reality that so many Indian women also go missing every year in the USA.
As the TRT of the film nears its beginning, we learn that Mary Ellen Johnson Davis went missing from the Tulalip Reservation on November 26, 2020. The current situation makes it impossible for her family to even speak to her, let alone know if she is alive; yet, they still hope for her survival which is rather heartening. Most of the alarming and terrifying things she has gone through in her life are mostly left out when she has covered her past by collecting information about the friends she went out with.
She and a lot of other people in the Indigenous community were asking why Davis disappeared and the truth is that a lot of other Native American women have gone missing as well and some even in a horrible way with their bodies stuffed in a forsaken refrigerator that people rent out.
Under Secretary Deborah Parker and U.S. Secretary to the Interior Deb Haaland, depathologization will be brought into context. This has to do with the reservation policemen’s jurisdiction space which is limited to certain categories of crime. This, as one interviewee puts it, causes the hot potato effect, with no one wanting to assume blame for this. Thus reservations have emerged as effectively no governance zones in which armed and violent men are free to indulge their sexual and murderous fantasies without any consequence.
The indigenous people’s poor savagery is a loathsome attitude and it is not something that is unheard of. It is when Missing from Fire Trail Road starts in its glorious last half bringing into context the time frame that the state would like the people to forget in most cases would like the people to remember. Their aim now is to fine-tune the abduction of Native Children in an effort to place them in ‘boarding schools’ with all the harsh dictatorial changes that White America put in place.
These kids got their culture taken away from them. Therefore, a generation of Indigenous individuals emerged, dislocated from their language and their nation. The film combines the narrative of the abuse of women by looking at discrimination practices towards Native Americans and linking them to such unreasonable violence against women of color in contemporary America.
Mary Ellen Johnson Davis’s family is expecting answers that they know are not likely to be found, and you feel the pain. It would also provoke an unpleasant feeling of anger and Internet rage. So long as the system remains unchanged, the social environment will continue to “explain” the violent behavior of men to women. We are hopeful that Missing from Fire Trail Road will help spur discussion that leads to action. The morally abhorrent truth is that all women presented in this film are going to be the next victims statistically some of them are.
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