Growing up, Erica Tremblay would watch her aunts and uncles tell stories and make people laugh. “I saw the audience move and lean in, and I wanted that power. I wanted to be the person who inspires other people to lean in.”
In the Seneca Cayuga Nation, on the Oklahoma-Missouri border, near the small town where she was raised by her mother, collective storytelling was part of daily life. But so was economic hardship, violence, unsolved murders of women, and the forced removal of children. “It’s a deep wound that remains,” she says. “From the moment of first contact, violence against Native women has been pervasive and continues to this day. As a Native person, whenever I go online or on social media, I see posters being shared about missing people.”
Now, 30 years later, she weaves this enduring crisis into her touching, offbeat and humorous debut feature, Fancy Dance, which dwells not on the horror but on the strength and ingenuity it takes for a community to survive it. The film stars Lily Gladstone, an Oscar nominee for Killers of the Flower Moon, as Jax, an enigmatic lesbian prostitute who informally adopts her 13-year-old niece Loki (Isabelle DeRoy-Olson) after her sister disappears.
Jax isn’t an obvious role model. She has a criminal record, and when her supplies run low, she teaches Loki how to shoplift. Her sister was a stripper and a small-time drug dealer who sold drugs to oilmen who lived in a trailer park near their house. “I wasn’t trying to tell a story about a model minority who does everything by the book and looks and acts a certain way,” Tremblay says. “I wanted Jax to have a lot of gray. I wanted her to be someone who reacts to situations according to her heart and doesn’t seem very smart at times. But she makes all these decisions because she truly believes it’s what’s best for her niece and for herself. And, you know, I care so much about these people in my life. I wouldn’t be here today, talking to you all about who I am, without people like Jax.”
Isabel DeRoy-Olson and Lily Gladstone perform in Fancydance. Photo: Apple
Tremblay and Gladstone’s friendship dates back to their work together on the short film Little Chief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. “I was asked a lot of times, ‘Are you going to make this into a feature film?’ But I never really thought about it because the story was kind of a breather. It was written as a short. But I realized that people were really interested in the world and the strong Indigenous character that Lily played. So I called her and said, ‘Hey, do you want to do a feature film?'”
At the time, Tremblay was in Canada, working on a three-year language training course in Cayuga, where there are fewer than 20 native speakers left; she says the last fluent speaker of the language in her community in Oklahoma died in the late 1980s. One thing Tremblay learned was that the word for aunt, knohá:ˀah, means little mother. “I was struck by how matrilineal kinship and matriarchy, which was destroyed by colonialism, was still so present in the language. I had this image in my head of this aunt and niece dancing, and I started thinking about how I could get them there.”
Now in her early 40s, Tremblay speaks by video link from upstate New York, where she lives on the land where the Seneca-Cayuga people were born before they were expelled and scattered across North America. Growing up, Tremblay says she was always the bossy girl in her neighborhood. After her mother, a teacher, bought her a video camera at the local Goodwill store, Tremblay began getting her cousins to perform for her. But she didn’t even know film directing existed, so when she got a scholarship to a state university, she thought she’d go into journalism, “so I could get as close to the camera as possible.”
Her epiphany came much later, in the late 1990s. “Right around the time I was starting to come out queer, I saw a queer film called High Art, and at the end it said the director was Lisa Cholodenko. It seems strange to think about it now, with the internet and all, but at the time, it was the first time I realised that a woman could do this work.”
Native Americans have been telling stories for thousands of years, and those stories will continue to exist.
She started making “cheesy short films” with friends on weekends and got a job as an assistant on a small film being shot in the Midwest. There she met a guy from Los Angeles who’d worked for David Fincher. “He was really nice and good at his job, but just a regular guy. And it was a revelation: I could go to Los Angeles.” She saved up the $2,000 she thought she’d need and drove there. Everything was going well, but she realized she needed health insurance and a livable wage. “You know, it’s hard to get that as an assistant when you’re working in Hollywood.”
So she saved up money to get a job in advertising and make it in New York. But her dream of becoming a film director never faded. “So I took a chance to write a short film and joined the Sundance Native American Lab. And when my short film was selected for Sundance in 2020, I thought this was a sign that I should really give it a go. That’s when I quit all my day jobs, moved to a remote reservation, learned my native language during the day, and started writing at night.”
At Sundance, she read a script for an Indigenous romantic comedy written by her future writing partner on Fancy Dance, Miciana Alice. “I DMed her and said, ‘Hey, I have an outline for a film I want to do. Can you bring your romantic comedy sensibility to an aunt-niece relationship?'” Though the subject matter is serious, the comedic elements are important, she says.
“We’re really funny people. I think when you go through as much darkness as Native people, one of your survival mechanisms is to laugh and find the joy in things. I wanted to portray a real picture of what it means to be Native. And Isabel and Lily are both really funny people in real life. From the moment they came on, they were pranking each other and pranking the set. They really were Jax and Loki in a lot of ways.”
In addition to his own filmmaking, Tremblay has also worked on groundbreaking Native American TV series Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds. And things seem to be changing for the better, at least in terms of representation. “But, you know, Native Americans have been telling stories as a living part of their culture for thousands of years. Those stories have always been there and have contributed to our communities, and those stories will always be there.
“Speaking specifically of Western media and Western distribution systems, we’ve been rightly pushed aside. So are we seeing a healthier time for that version of Indigenous storytelling? Absolutely. Are we getting called upon as Indigenous storytellers? Absolutely. Are we being hired into leadership positions and positions of power in Hollywood in a way that we weren’t 10 or 15 years ago? Absolutely. There’s momentum. We’re seeing it with the success of all these shows. We’re seeing it with Lily Gladstone’s Amazing Journey last year. But I think it’s always important to say that our representation has never waned. I mean, it waned when it was illegal for us to perform our ceremonies, but what did we do? We found a way to do it and we retained that knowledge, and in that way we still have those stories and we can still tell those stories.”
She is committed to continuing to tell the story of her people in any way she can: “For me, the place or the medium doesn’t matter – whether it’s TV or film. I want to tell stories that intrigue people. That’s my goal, my dream.”
