Wind River (2017)

*Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada

It’s interesting that a previously under-reported issue should suddenly come into the public awareness. What caught our eye was the bleakness of the film’s environment. It didn’t take us long to understand what was really going on in the film.

Wind River is a 2017 neo-Western crime film written and directed by Taylor Sheridan. It is the third film by Sheridan on the modern American West. The film stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracker and an FBI agent, respectively, who try to solve a murder on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Gil Birmingham, Jon Bernthal, and Graham Greene also star.

Sheridan has said that he wrote the film to raise awareness of the issue of the high number of Indigenous women who are raped and murdered, both on and off reservations.

Wikipedia

Without knowing that this film was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, we saw similarities to Yellowstone, including two of the principal actors from that show, and the idea of a white man being intimately involved with a Native Indian tribe. The echoes were too obvious to miss.

Ostensibly, this film was based in Wyoming, but, as usual, filmed near Calgary. That makes it personal for Canadians. We are not proud of how the First Nations people are/were treated/mistreated, and even recently, four bodies of murdered Indigenous women are being discovered in a Winnipeg landfill.

So this stuff is real. It’s time to put a stop to sweeping this it under a rug. It’s time to bring it to the light.