Missing from Fire Trail Road Film Review
Angela - Drama Movies
03/14/25 02:10 PM
I'm unable to publish my latest review on the Drama Movies site due to technical issues, so I'm posting it here.
What transpires when there are no consequences for criminal behavior? Tribal nations have been grappling with this issue for decades, especially since the 1978 US Supreme Court ruling that tribes do not have jurisdiction over non-natives on tribal land. FBI Special Agent Richard Collodi, while acknowledging he has no evidence to support the statement, thinks the ruling has had no effect. Interviewed for this film, he confidently states, “Native women are not being targeted.”
“Missing From Fire Trail Road”, written and directed by Sabrina Van Tassel, provides a scathing rebuttal to Agent Collodi’s assertion. Since the FBI does not collect data on the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), Van Tassel provides statistics from the National Criminal Justice Training Center. Indigenous women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than any other ethnicity and homicide is the third leading cause of death for Native women. Four out of five Native women experience violence.
Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, a Tulalip woman who disappeared from the tribe’s Washington State reservation in 2020, is the main subject of “Missing from Fire Trail Road”. Using the fly-on-the-wall technique, filmmaker Van Tassel stays off-camera and off-mic as she interviews family members and shadows their investigation of Johnson-Davis’s disappearance.
Like many Indigenous children, Johnson-Davis and her sister were placed in foster care; the sequel to the government’s boarding school policy. Both girls were sexually abused by their foster families. A monetary settlement that should have made life easier for Johnson-Davis, ironically, made her more vulnerable to predators. According to her sister, Mary Ellen’s husband (non-native) stole her money before absconding to California. A pair of known drug dealers on the reservation (again, non-natives) also seem to have targeted the missing woman for abuse.
The family’s legal counsel, Gabriel Galanda, describes the situation as a game of “hot potato”. The tribal police cannot prosecute non-natives so they hand off the investigation to the state which sends it to the federal authorities. The FBI is offering a cash reward for information leading to the recovery of Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, but that seems the extent of their involvement.
The verdant beauty and the incongruous poverty of the Pacific Northwest reservations are captured by the cinematography of Christophe Astruc. Ominous shots of Douglas fir trees shrouded in mist hint at the illicit activity occurring that takes advantage of nature’s camouflage. What criminals aim to hide, documentaries like “Missing from Fire Trail Road” make visible. While MMIW organizations pressure the authorities to act, the case of Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis shows Indigenous families are often compelled to pursue justice on their own.
“Missing from Fire Trail Road” was released in 2024. It is available on DVD and Blu-Ray. The documentary is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, which is how I watched the film at my own expense.