This is where hiring an Indigenous, feminist writer or director would have strengthened the story. I do not understand why the Land chose a White man who has minimal interactions with Indigenous women. In class, Land was equated to women, motherhood, and the female body in Indigenous cultures. The land of Wind River (filmed in Utah) is an essential character in the story, and delivers justice through Lambert. The Land leads him to Natalie’s body, then to her boyfriend’s body, cloaks him in invisibility during a shootout with the oil company, and together they kill Natalie’s rapist. I noticed that while he does not interact with many Indigenous women throughout the film, he works very well with the Land. The White, male savior is Renner’s character Cory Lambert. Acacia Entertainment is owned by the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana (Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana 2017) Sheridan successfully took the film from The Weinstein Company, leaving Acacia Entertainment as the primary producer (Keegan 2017). Thus, Wind River’s ironic story is a modern interpretation on the colonizer narrative. #Wind river cast movieAdditionally, Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault crimes prevented funding for sexual assault victims from a movie about sexual assault. The hollow promises regarding donations to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center continue the shameful legacy of colonizers using Indigenous bodies and land for profit (Buckley 2019). I also noticed my sources using the term “epidemic” to describe the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (Aadland 2019, Schilling 2017) after our class discussion on the inaccuracy of that term. Though it is not yet available for viewing, high school students on the Wind River reservation made an award-winning video on the topic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (Aadland 2019). If Sheridan had tried to tell a different story, it would come off as far more exploitive and ingenuine. This realization was discouraging, but ultimately, I prefer that Sheridan tell the stories he is most qualified to tell, such as recognizing one’s Whiteness and struggling to uphold a heteropatriarchal, masculine image while mourning. Once I understood that Wind River was actually about male grief and white presence on reservations, I understood how this movie could involve Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, yet, not be about them at all. I imagine Wind River’s primary characters (portrayed by White actors Renner and Elizabeth Olsen) reached similar conclusions, as did the writer/director Taylor Sheridan. As a colonizer’s descendant, I read Trask’s piece and felt terrible for centuries of wrongs I could never correct. Haunani-Kay Trask’s piece about haole presence in Hawai’i (Trask 1996). The second breakthrough was thinking back to when we addressed Whitestream feminism, particularly Dr. My first breakthrough was in reading the Rise Up Daily blog, when I saw that the grieving between Jeremy Renner and Gil Birmingham’s characters is far stronger than any feminine themes in the film (Armstrong 2017). After conducting research on the film’s production and release, I am disappointed that it is the only mainstream representation of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, but the story behind Wind River is just as riveting as the final film. Wind River was at the front of my mind during class because it was my only previous reference to the topics. The film appears in my thesis proposal as a new Western that breaks the traditional representation of time period, characters, and landscapes. Wind River (2017) was my introduction to the topic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. I look at that more acutely in Wind River.Wind River and its Concerning Lack of Indigenous Feminism When you become a new father, there are things that terrify you. Last month, Sheridan told us that the motif running through the trio was “fatherhood the sojourns of a father. Jeremy Renner plays the town’s game tracker who assists Elizabeth Olsen’s fish-out-of-water FBI agent to hunt down the murderer in Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation.Īfter penning two back-to-back Cannes Film Festival entries-turned awards contenders, 2015’s Sicario and last year’s Hell or High Water, Sheridan calls Wind River his “most personal,” a conclusion “to a lot of themes” he introduced in these first two titles a reason why he sought out to direct this time around. The opening shot: a young Native American teenage girl runs to her death, barefoot in the snow. government clashing with protesters and the community of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation over the Dakota Access Pipeline, along comes Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, a timely thriller centered around the continued injustice toward Native Americans in our nation.
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