On November 25, 2020, Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis went missing while walking along a wooded road on lands owned by the Tulalip tribe in Washington state. The 39-year-old woman, a member of the tribe, was in the process of trying to get out from her marriage to a white man whom family members say was abusing her. It was two weeks before the unnamed husband will tell her family that she had disappeared and it was their responsibility to notify the police. A few weeks later, he had moved to California, taking with him a large sum of money that Johnson-David had won in a legal settlement. Left behind was a family grieving for their missing loved ones, angry and frustrated that no one seemed to care about finding her. This is the infuriating and heartbreaking picture painted in the new documentary Missing From Fire Trail Road.
Like in her previous documentary, The State Of Texas Vs. Melissa which played at Tribeca in 2020, documentarian Sabrina Van Tassel’s new film again examines the danger that many women of marginalized communities live in day to day. Jurisdictional restrictions keep tribal police from enforcing laws on tribal lands if non-tribal people are involved. This loop hole has allowed many men to commit sexual assault and even murder with law enforcement basically playing hot potato, no one wanting to take up many of these cases. The Tulalip tribal police have no jurisdiction to go to California to interview Johnson-Davis’s husband. In the face of at best indifference from the state and federal government outside of tribal lands, it has hard to disagree with the tribe’s belief that such inaction allows them to be preyed upon with impunity.
As the documentary unfolds, Johnson-Davis’s family and friends try to reconstruct her movements leading up to her disappearance. But they can only investigate so far before they hit upon a wall of questions that they can’t and indeed many never get an answer to. Interweaving their story with the tales of other women who have been abused and assaulted and interviews with indigenous people advocates to help provide context. There is a long history of indigenous women being abused, stretching back to when Indian children were taken by the government and forcefully placed in boarding schools and foster homes where they were frequently assaulted. An FBI representative offers some weak excuses as to why their investigation has turned up nothing.
To some, Johnson-Davis’s case may be just one of many, another file in a stack of unsolved crimes. But by centering the film on her and her family, Van Tassel forces us to see that all of those women assaulted or gone missing or murdered are not part of a statistic but people who have left empty, painful holes in their lives.
