[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. In a 2016 study on violence in the Indigenous community, it was found that while there are over 5,000 reports of missing persons, only 116 were actually entered into the national database. That same report found that murder was the third cause of death among Indigenous women, and that four in five Indigenous women had experienced violence in their lifetime.

Other startling stats have surfaced, including the fact that Indigenous women are over ten times more likely to go missing than white women, and have high rates of being victims of human trafficking. While these numbers alone are scary, behind these numbers and statistics are real people, mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties, girlfriends, wives. They are pillars of the community, as well as those falling through the cracks. Those with addictions and those with ambitions and plans for college, and they have loved ones who care that they are gone.

A new film attempts to humanize these stories. It's called Fancy Dance. It stars Academy Award-nominated Golden Globe winner Lily Gladstone as a woman on the margins, trying to provide stability for her niece when her sister goes missing. Her niece is played by Isabel DeRoy-Olson, and both Lily and Isabel are here today. Welcome both of you.

Lily Gladstone: Thank you so much for that.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Lily, but before we jump into the film, I just wanted to congratulate you on all your accolades this past year for Killers of the Flower Moon. How did you celebrate? Did you have time to celebrate?

Lily Gladstone: Oh, yes. I think there were a lot of little celebrations happening around me too, which was wonderful. I think a campaign is pretty exhausting. Sudden spotlights of famousness. Fame is a weird thing, but it was really cool and sustaining to see just how many people across Indian country, particularly, were celebrating it all. It really was for everybody.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, absolutely. We all appreciate you both being here during another very busy time, another campaign for this new movie. About this film, in a recent interview, Lily, you said that you'd always wanted to work with Director Erica Tremblay. What do you like about Erica's work?

Lily Gladstone: I first worked with her on a short, when she was a Sundance Lab fellow, called Little Chief. You can watch it on YouTube. I got sent the script after I got a text from Sterlin Harjo, who was her mentor at Sundance. He said, "Hey, you're going to get an email with a script from my mentee, Erica Tremblay. It's great. You should read it." I'm like, "Great, send it." On the other end of it, I guess Erica was nervous jumping up and down because he asked her to dream cast it and she chose me. She said my name and never thought that she would have access to me for some reason. Then Sterlin was like, "Oh, I'll just text her."

When the script landed in my inbox, it was seven pages that told what felt like a feature or a miniseries. It was so immense and so minimal. That's a gift. I know the kind of talent it takes to write a good short story. I know to write a haiku, to write a short film, it's an incredible art form. I think it really demonstrates how strong an artistic voice is, what they can do in a limited space. I knew I wanted to work with her on a feature. Before we even left set, I wanted to ask her, but then she asked me if she could write a feature for me. That's what became Fancy Dance.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wow. When you first held Fancy Dance in your hands, when you're reading through it, what was something that you wanted to make sure that you got right, that the film got right?

Lily Gladstone: The relationship between Jax and Roki. It's maybe the sole experience I've had as an actor where even though the part was written for me and for what I can do, I didn't immediately project myself or my performance into it. I just read it as a story and I fell in love with these characters. I was actually, and Erica only found this out a couple days ago, I was terrified that I wasn't going to rise to the occasion. I think something about the world that she drew with Miciana was so real and still had these incredibly beautiful high stakes that you want in a film. It was still thrilling. It had me leaning forward the whole time but maintained that minimalism, maintained that very lived-in quality.

I knew what the film could be. I had such an intense reaction to reading it in that I didn't even notice that I'd read it. When I was done my face was wet with tears and I was short of breath and I read it immediately again. I hadn't moved an inch. I was just arrested and in the story and craning my neck with tech neck reading it. I think I wanted to not get in the way of the script. It was so perfect as it was.

I was just dying to find our Roki. I wanted to find who Roki was and I wanted to start making it immediately. I didn't have confidence that I was right for it until I heard Jax's voice come out of my mouth in the first take on the first day.

Kousha Navidar: Well, talk a little bit about finding Roki. Before I go to Isabel, what was that process like? When did you know that you found the right person for the job?

Lily Gladstone: Leo and I never had a chem read or a formal audition, Isabel and I never did either. Marty just knew that he wanted me for Molly. Erica just knew Isabel was Roki. We met in the production office. Erica let me know, no, we found her when I was saying, "Hey, I've got some time in my schedule if you want me to read any Rokis. She's like, "No, I think I found her." Then she said, "I think you two are going to play really well. She has this sense of humor. She has this quality. She's really mature, but she reads so young." I was like, "Great, can't wait to meet her."

Then the Jax that I was able to churn out is because of the way that Isabel built Roki and the way we built those characters together. It was such a joy when we got to do that. Isabel, this is your feature film debut. Congratulations, first of all. What drew you to this script, this character of Roki? How does it feel to hear Lily talk about the support and the authenticity that you're able to bring?

Isabel DeRoy-Olson: Yes, thank you. It was my debut feature. It was such a joy to play Roki. It started out for me just as a self-tape that I sent in without me knowing. Erica had seen me read for another role in a different production. She thought of me and she remembered me because I read so young for that part that it just didn't work out. I'm so grateful that she did remember me because Roki is such an important character. She's such a joy to play.

I always say as an actor, I love playing those roles that are very few in words but have so much to say. That kid is so smart. She just loves to watch and observe and learn from the beautiful, strong women who raised her, who love her. I'm very similar in that way because I get to watch Lily do all of the amazing things she's been doing. She's incredible. She's so generous and kind and welcoming. I think that coming to this set, I was nervous because it was my first feature. Upon meeting Lily, I felt I was okay and I felt supported.

Kousha Navidar: It's interesting that you bring up that idea of Roki being such a big listener and that being something that you focused on in your portrayal of the character, because as an actor, a lot of it is listening. I'm wondering for you how you approach that concept of listening, not as an actor, but as Roki. Do you think about that at all?

Isabel DeRoy-Olson: Yes, absolutely. Me, as a person, I just love to listen to people speak. I love that. Getting to bring that into my work is so fun for me. A part of Roki being so quiet, but the things that she does say are so important and the language that she speaks is so important. Getting to work on Cayuga and speaking an Indigenous language in such a beautiful film was so important to us and then to the cast and crew and to Cayuga language speakers. It's such a beautiful way to portray that relationship that Jax and Roki have. It's this beautiful, isolated, but comfortable space that that language holds for them. It was lovely.

Kousha Navidar: I'm so happy that you bring up Cayuga because this is something else that I was thinking about. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about Fancy Dance. It's a new film. It's premiering in theaters June 21st, and it's on Apple TV+ June 28th. We're speaking to its stars, Lily Gladstone and Isabel DeRoy-Olson. We just heard Cayuga. Lily, Jax and Roki slide back and forth between English and the Cayuga language. You spoke Osage in Killers of the Flower Moon. These are not your native language. Which one was harder to feel natural in for you and why?

Lily Gladstone: Osage, definitely. Cayuga was difficult to learn. There was one day Isabel and I both showed up to set in the morning in tears because we were struggling so much and didn't want to let each other down in the scene. We picked each other back up and nobody noticed Isabel. Erica felt like it was one of the stronger Cayuga scenes actually.

For me, Cayuga is, if we're getting linguistic about it, it's an Algonquin-based language, like Blackfeet is. There was a similar cadence. There were really similar morphemes, glottal stops, the same plosives, the same consonants, a lot of the same constant usage, and some words even somewhat sound alike. I guess if an English speaker were to start stumbling through German, you would notice a few things are the same or very similar, but then a lot of it just sounds, you know, but the transition is easier. Whereas learning Osage would be like an English speaker picking up Japanese. It's just outside of the realm of anything that was familiar to me.

Learning for both was such an important thing. Both languages, there are fluent speakers. As far as Cayuga goes for this film, there are less than 20 first language Cayuga speakers left on the planet. It's an imagined world, which is one of the gifts of getting to be a filmmaker and a storyteller. You can put the world as you want to see it on screen. When it comes to something as precious and as irreplaceable as an Indigenous language, there are language immersion and revitalization efforts.

Seneca Cayuga's are mostly concentrated in Canada with six nations, which is where Erica put herself through three years of school. It's where she got the inspiration for these characters upon learning the words mother and auntie. Maternal auntie, kno:há and kno:ha:ah, mother and small mother. Erica wanted to integrate that worldview into the entirety of the script. It was really important to us in this imagined reality where you do have a Millennial and a Gen Z fluently by choice in the home speaking Cayuga because they want to, and then also using it when they need privacy in public to communicate.

Kids who are learning the language, a lot of times in immersion programs, kids will leave their school world fluent in the language as a second language, but the usage away from school starts to peer out. I've always felt that if your most authentic voice, this came directly to me from John Trudell, your most authentic voice as a human being is your artistic voice. I would hear stories of people going to visit my Grandma Lily in Seattle after she and her family, my grandparents relocated to Seattle from the Res, a lot of the Blackfeet diasporas in Seattle.

People would talk about going over. It's like, "Oh, yes. We used to go over to Lily's house because she talked good Indian." And people in that generation talking about how good it felt to them to speak their language physically, how good it felt to speak the language. Creating a space where it feels physically good to express emotion, it feels physically good to express creativity. If you can do that in a language, then it's alive and then you want to hold onto it.

You need that modeled. As a young kid who's immersing themselves in learning how to speak it, if they see a girl their age in Roki, choosing to speak it, choosing to ask questions about her family and in the language, choosing to have these moments, it becomes normalized. It's an image of a world we want to see. When we talk about the power of representation, that's what we mean. It's really a transformative quality.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Isabel, I'm wondering for you, what was the process? How long did it take at the point, Lily's comment about there was a day where it was really tough and you had to cry together to find that sense of artistic voice as Lily is saying? What was that process for you?

Isabel DeRoy-Olson: We had two weeks of pre-production to do intensive work to learn the language. We really put a lot of work in. Even on set, we were still practicing our lines offscreen meticulously. The same goes for the powwow in the first couple weeks. It was honestly just so fun. It was scary, but it was so fun. Getting to work with Hauli Sioux Gray, who was our powwow teacher and she gave us the choreography. It was a lovely, lovely experience. She is such an incredible human being and getting to learn powwow through her was beautiful. We both have studio dance backgrounds, ballet backgrounds ironically. Getting to really tap into the powwow was fun.

Kousha Navidar: You mentioned [crosstalk]

Lily Gladstone: Hauli was actually our Tawi. Sorry. Yes, Hauli that she's talking about is Tawi in the film.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, really?

Lily Gladstone: Yes. Through the dance, we had this chance to build this family dynamic, and so much of why Isabel and I think works so well on screen together is there's an unspoken physical language we have, like you have with your close family. There was always a third leg to that toadstool because we built that with Hauli. She was at the heart of it. It lent itself well to when Hauli went back to her life that we were missing that third leg on our tripod. Then it's like Jackson and Roki are trying to find balance without her.

Kousha Navidar: Well, Isabel, you mentioned this, you both studied ballet. I found it very gripping the dance sequences in the movie. There's a funny reference to ballet in the film as well, which I found quite interesting. I'm wondering maybe, Lily, for you, how does your dance background enhance how you two moved around each other?

Lily Gladstone: I think it gave us a sense of counterbalance and of timing. One place that really showed up was in that pump switch scene. We couldn't see what each other were doing on the other side of the gas pump, when we're stealing the gas and doing the little trick of switching the two. When you watch it, there's a real rhythm to it. There's a mimetic quality. We're moving in a very similar way. I think that comes from having a ballet background. You learn how to move in a group. You learn how to move in a solo. You learn how to hold yourself, how to pivot certain ways. There's a flow that we both have in how we move that possibly came from that foundation.

Kousha Navidar: It did feel very synchronous, I would say, not exactly the same but synchronous. I think that's like in the weave. There's this part of the film that I want to touch on as well. The Reservation has only one cop, it's Jax's half brother JJ and his hands are tied even though he's with law enforcement. I want to play a clip that touches on this in the film. Jax has taken Roki from her White grandparents who have temporary custody of her. Jax's half brother JJ is calling her trying to get them to come back. Let's listen to it.

Jax: What do you want?

JJ: Jax, where the hell are you? You got to get Roki back here right now.

Jax: I'll be back in a couple days.

JJ: You're not understanding me. Her dad reported Roki missing. There's an Amber alert out for the two of you. You're wanted for kidnapping and child endangerment.

Jax: He called the cops on me.

JJ: Hit the whole calvary out. State, municipal, FBI. Where are you? I'll come get you.

Jax: If everybody's out looking for me, who's looking for Tawi?

JJ: Tawi ain't going to be nobody's priority until they get Roki back.

Jax: Priority? Tawi is the one who's missing. She could be anywhere.

JJ: If you come back now we just chuck this all up to a misunderstanding. Just tell me where you are. We'll put the real pressure on him, Jax.

Jax: You put the pressure on him now.

Kousha Navidar: Lily, to Jax's question that we heard in the clip, why is Roki the priority here and not Tawi?

Lily Gladstone: Roki is under the care of her White grandparents who were the ones who called the feds. Roki being with her aunt is a violation of the judge's order for temporary placement. Roki's case falls into a jurisdictional process that has a very clear answer. Tawi's case, like you said, these statistics that brought tears to my eyes that you were quoting in the beginning, Tawi hasn't even entered the system yet.

There's a beat in the film that's really impactful because of the fact that Tawi is not yet in the system. It's a small gift that she's able to give Jax and Roki in a moment that they really need to evade an ICE agent. Jax pretends to be Tawi for a second and the agent checks and sees it's like, "Yes, clearly, you're where you're supposed to be." The irony is clearly she's not. It's clearly these are two Indigenous women being questioned on their immigration status for speaking a language that's not English. They get away from that moment because Tawi is not in the system, even though she's been missing for two weeks.

There's the sympathetic, like, oh, we just want Roki back safe and sound news moment that we're used to seeing so much. There's the Amber alert, where you see this bright, shining, beautiful girl, and then a mugshot of her auntie. There's a different formula that Jax and Tawi fall into, that in that moment Roki doesn't because it's her grandparents calling, because it's a judge that said she can't be in the custody of her aunt right now.

Kousha Navidar: It reflects so much of what we who might not be a part of the community are not aware is happening right now or even if you are aware, it is a gross reality. Isabel, you're Canadian, is that right? Am I getting that right?

Isabel DeRoy-Olson: Yes, I am.

Kousha Navidar: I was wondering for you, did you see any parallels that First Nations people are experiencing in Canada? Did it resonate with you in any way?

Isabel DeRoy-Olson: Absolutely. With us, it's something that all of our communities face, it's something that all of our communities know about, and being in Canada doesn't make that any different. I think that's what's so important about the film is so many people are still so unaware. The thing is, if you're in North America, you're on Indigenous land. These are things that are happening around us all the time, so frequently. They're so horrific and awful, but they're things that we should be talking about.

I think that what the film does so well is it covers those topics so beautifully and so gracefully, while still maintaining such beautiful parts of our community. As Indigenous Peoples, we love to laugh. We love to joke around with each other, and shows like Res Dogs really highlights that. I think Fancy Dance does a great job of it. Roki is such a little ball of light. She's such a joy and such a beacon of hope, and so getting to see those lighter moments are really, really important for audiences to notice as well.

Kousha Navidar: Is there a specific moment of light from the movie that really stands out to you that you enjoy?

Isabel DeRoy-Olson: I love the diner scene so much where she's eating all the strawberries after she got her first period. Women's bodies are so stigmatized, and so the fact that we're seeing this young girl be so proud of her body is beautiful. It's a really beautiful thing to watch. There's never a moment in the film where Roki is ashamed of herself. I think that's such a great teaching moment and such a great moment for young people to see.

Kousha Navidar: No joke, the diner scene and the strawberry pancakes specifically, my favorite shot of the movie. I loved it. I was like, "Oh, man. I got to get pancakes right now." Fancy Dance is premiering in theaters June 21st and on Apple TV+ June 28th. We were lucky to speak to its stars Lily Gladstone and Isabel DeRoy-Olson. Thank you so much both for this movie and for coming out and hanging out with us. Really appreciate it.

Isabel DeRoy-Olson: Thank you.

Lily Gladstone: Thank you for having us.

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