Movie: Wind River
Date: August 2017
Genre: Crime/Thriller
Location: Wind River Reservation, Wyoming
Rating: Four out of five stars
The movie I have chosen to watch is Wind River made in 2017. This movie takes place in the Wind River Reservation located in Wyoming. This reservation is the seventh-largest Native American reservation in the United States and covers about 2.2 million acres. Wind River reservation is home to the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho peoples. This movie is the final installment of writer and director Taylor Sheridan’s American Frontier Trilogy. This is a series of three films that explore a more modern American Frontier.
This movie touches on the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, as well as the complexities that tribal law enforcement face when seeking justice for the victims. The main plot of this movie is about a wildlife officer and FBI agent teaming up to solve the murder and rape of a young Native woman on the Wind River Reservation.
To me, this was a highly realistic movie. It talks about a real ongoing issue that many native women and community members face, as well as the issue of underfunding law enforcement on Native Reservations. In the movie, there were only six law enforcement agents on the entire reservation. This is only six law enforcement officers that need to cover all 2.2 million acres of the reservation. It also talks about not having the right resources or access to well-needed resources. For example, it would take an ambulance over an hour to get to the reservation if someone was in need of help. This lack of resources could be a reason many of these issues are happening. If they only have six officers present within the 2.2 million acre reservation it would be hard to adequately monitor and watch all of that area to stop any crime from happening. Especially because half of that territory is wilderness and hard to access even more so in the wintertime. This lack of police force could also be why a lot of the missing women cases go unsolved. While these are important issues the main problem this move brings to light is the missing and murdered Indigenous women.
According to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, there are various reports that state one in three Native Women will be raped in their lifetime, and three in five will be physically assaulted. They also say that Native women are more than twice as likely to be stalked than other women and are being murdered at a rate ten times the national average. The opening scene of the movie shows a young Native woman running through the snow at night. In this scene, it seems like she is running from something. I think that including this as the opening scene of the movie was really catching and it really pulls you into the story. It personally made me want to know more. It made me question what or who could she be running from. Then, not soon after her body is found in the snow. Later in the movie, the autopsy showed that she was raped, this is where I was able to draw a connection to what may have happened in the opening scene. After that, the rest of the movie is about the FBI agent and wildlife agent working together to prove that her death was a murder.
Within the movie, they talk about multiple women who have been raped and killed on the Reservation. It also talks about the main character’s daughter who went missing and was eventually found killed on the reservation. Similarly to the murder currently investigated, her body was found in the snow far away from where she was last seen. I believe that one of the main points of this movie was to bring this issue to light in a way that non-natives can relate to and learn about. I think they do this by having both the two main characters being non-Native. In my opinion, this allows the audience to experience these issues from a non-Native perspective. It’s their way of helping the audience step foot in the reservations and learn what is happening. I think that the very ending scene of the movie was also very influential in making the audience aware of the issues occurring. The last scene shows the two fathers who lost their daughters sitting side by side when words pop up on the screen stating “While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American Women. No one knows how many are missing.”
I had always known that there was an ongoing issue of violence against Native women after watching this movie and that being the final line in the movie it was really a wake-up call. In my opinion that line is like the final punch in the gut. While in the movie they were able to solve this woman’s murder and bring her and her family justice, there are still so many women out there who face this issue and do not get the justice they deserve. There are still so many murders of Native Women that have gone unsolved. To me, that final scene of the two fathers sitting together remembering the loved ones they lost, and then having those words pop up on the screen was very impactful.
I thoroughly appreciated how your review had such a substantial focus on sexual violence perpetrated against Native Americans. While I imagine that we may still designate some time to this issue in class, I’ve felt like, so far, it has been largely absent. The quantitative evidence you used in your review was eye-opening. I knew that it was a significant problem Native communities were facing but I had no clue it was that bad. You also gave a good summary of the film and, overall, it was a good review.
I definitely will need to watch this movie. You did a great job of summarizing and analyzing the film as well as providing data from sources outside the movie in order to provide context for how big of an issue there is with the disproportionately high number of missing and murdered Indigenous women.