‘Fancy Dance’ co-writer/director Erica Tremblay on how studying her Indigenous language inspired her narrative feature debut
Growing up in the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, Erica Tremblay didn’t hear her Indigenous language spoken around her all that often. With the last first-language speaker in her community having passed away in 1989, before Tremblay was even 10, she only ever heard it in “rote, memorized speeches” during ceremonies, the filmmaker tells Gold Derby during a recent webchat (watch the full interview above). So when she decided to study the Cayuga language as part of a three-year-long language immersion program, she forged a deeper connection with her Native culture — one that inspired what would become her narrative feature directorial debut, “Fancy Dance.”
“When we were learning familial words, I learned that the word for mother is ‘knó:ha?’ and that the word for your mother’s sister, your aunt, is ‘knohá:?ah’ — that ‘ah’ is diminutive, meaning ‘little mother,’ ‘small mother,’ your ‘other mother,'” Tremblay, who also co-produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Miciana Alise, recalls. “Learning the language kind of broke open this new relationship with my culture, because the language was kind of preserved in this way that hadn’t been completely changed by patriarchy or white supremacy. And so this beautiful matriarchy and this beautiful matrilineal, like, clan system was still so strong in the way that the words were used.”
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Inspired to imagine a modern day in which Cayuga was spoken fluently — something that isn’t the case in most Haudenosaunee communities today, Tremblay notes — the writer-director became interested in the idea of telling a mother-daughter tale, but doing it “by way of an auntie and a niece.”
Released in select theaters by Apple Original Films on June 21 before streaming on Apple TV+ one week later, “Fancy Dance” is set on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma and follows Indigenous hustler Jax (Lily Gladstone) as she cares for her 13-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson), in the wake of her sister Tawi’s disappearance. While this disappearance, spotlighting the missing and murdered Indigenous women epidemic, as well as other systemic issues still affecting Indigenous communities are very much at the center of the indie drama, it was important to Tremblay that the film explore them through the eyes of its two protagonists.
“I just feel like our North Star, as we were writing this, was humanity,” she says, highlighting that this approach also influenced how the movie depicts Tawi, who never appears therein as a character and ultimately turns up dead, but whose presence is felt throughout. “We see her through the eyes of these two characters that loved her versus [through those of] some white savior coming in.”
Telling the story through a human lens also meant painting a picture of reservation life that didn’t just focus on Indigenous people’s pain and suffering. “When you have gone through 500 years of genocide and forced removal… and having kids stolen from you and put in boarding schools, and you’re surviving this kind of daily onslaught of trauma, you find coping mechanisms — and a lot of times, those coping mechanisms are family and laughing and finding ways to still experience closeness and joy,” Tremblay explains. “I always find it funny when people have these thoughts around what a reservation is, or what a trailer park is, or what HUD housing is. And I’m always like, ‘Well, what do you think happens in there? That people just, like, sit in the dark corner of the room and cry the whole time?’ But that’s the way that it’s been perceived, in a very anthropological way in the documentaries. And [there’s] this white gaze that has been [imposed] upon Native people since the dawning of Hollywood. And I think a film like this — while we still are talking about heavy topics and talking about these things that still impact modern Natives today, I do think it was really important for us to do it with humanity, to show that inside that trailer park, people are eating dinner and fighting with their mom and having sex with their boyfriend — and, like, all of these things that human beings do.”
With the support of the Cherokee Film Commission, Tremblay shot the majority of “Fancy Dance” on Cherokee land in Oklahoma. “That’s where my nation is. That’s where I spent most of my life,” the filmmaker accentuates, noting that she also had ties to the area due to her work as a writer and director on the Emmy-nominated FX series “Reservation Dogs,” which was filmed in various regions of Northeastern Oklahoma. “It just made a lot of sense, because the crew base is there, and it was crew that I had already worked with. And also, the Cherokee Nation film office — we were the first film to receive their film incentive. And so they have this great infrastructure at the Cherokee Nation film office, where they have a locations bible and you can go through and pick locations, and they’re very supportive. And so it was a wonderful experience to have a predominantly Native crew, with a Native cast, and shooting on Native lands.”
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