Early in Marie Clements’ How We Stand, a group of men, women and children are gathered beneath 1950s Los Angeles, singing and dancing together in a space meant to be hidden from the rest of the city. Then, right on cue, the police arrive, and a gun goes off. Angela (Cara Jade Myers), mother to three daughters, is shot by police and killed, and whatever refuge the gathering offered disappears with her. Clements slows the whole scene down, just in case a mother being shot in front of her daughters wasn’t enough to tell us that something very sad has happened.
It only takes the first act to understand what How We Stand is about, and only a few more scenes to realize that Clements’ heavy-handed strategy for expressing outrage at anti-Indigenous racism is to make it bluntly obvious. Though the acclaimed Métis/Dene filmmaker behind Bones of Crows is probing undeniably important territory, she leaves no room for mystery or nuance, despite having plenty of historical material to work with.
Premiering at TIFF as part of the festival’s Centrepiece program, the film follows Angela’s three daughters after they’re separated into foster care, catching up with them in 1973, when each has been shaped by a different consequence of that separation.
To that end, How We Stand plays like a generic “Colonialism 101” course. There’s Jessie (Amber Midthunder), whose story comes at the hands of a white adoptive family and a nurse who talks to her like English is something she just picked up. Miranda’s (Alyssa Wapanatâhk) story runs through Hollywood, where a director, whose attraction to the characters borders on fetishization, tells her she could pass for white if she’d only shed the “Indian” part. And then there’s Janey, (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) who lands in police custody and a psychiatric ward, and who is wracked by a grief caused by something the film initially keeps out of view.
There are other Indigenous films that handle painful histories with more sensitivity, such as Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, and Darlene Naponse’s Falls Around Her. These are films that understand the value of restraint; films that show, but don’t underline.
There is a showy elegance to Clements’ film, and its point of view no doubt feels grounded in reality. The generational effects of displacement, institutional violence and assimilation are all here. But How We Stand filters its storytelling through a whiteness so pre-programmed and caricatured that the machinery eventually becomes the movie, and these sisters, along with their responses to that machinery, begin to flatten into caricatures of their own.
