Coming Soon - Ivy & Ivan McDonald - “Love on the Ground”
Coming Soon
In this episode, I speak with the brother and sister, Blackfeet filmmaking team, Ivy & Ivan McDonald. During our conversation, we chat about Ivy’s journey to filmmaking, Ivan’s work as an activist and social worker, their living in Montana, and their commitment to honoring Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). Ivy and Ivan have been busy filming When We Were Here this summer and when dealing with such a heavy topic one might need to add a little levity to one’s life, this episode’s song is Cannons’ “Love on the Ground” because it’s Ivy’s new summer jam.
Ivy & Ivan’s Bio
Ivan and Ivy MacDonald are Blackfeet filmmakers based in Missoula, Montana. They have produced and directed work for the ACLU and ESPN. They are currently in production for their first feature-length documentary titled When They Were Here which focuses on the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls crisis in the state of Montana. When They Were Here is funded and supported by Vision Maker Media, the Montana Film Office, and ITVS.
About the When They Were Here
In Montana, indigenous women and girls make up only 3 - 4% of the population but they account for approximately 30% of those deemed missing by the Montana Department of Justice.
Ashely Loring Heavyrunner went missing on the Blackfeet reservation in Northern Montana in 2017. In the years since her disappearance, her sister Kimberly has spent countless hours searching for any evidence on a reservation the size of Delaware. The FBI only took on the case 10 months later, after Kimberly traveled to Washington DC to testify before congress.
In 2015, Lonette Keehner, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, was murdered by two white supremacists at the Super 8 Motel, where she had worked for over 20 years. The newspapers simply referred to Lonette as a housekeeper; to her family, she was much more than that, and it was devastating to see her life reduced to those words. Since her death, Lonette’s daughter Nicole has been working to tell her mother’s story while raising the voices of others who have been lost to the crisis. Lonette’s killers have been brought to trial, but the DA declined to include hate crime charges in their case.
In 2017 Bonnie Three Irons went missing near the Wolf Mountains on the Crow reservation. After struggling to file a missing person’s report with the local tribal police, her family organized a search party of their own, finding Bonnie’s body in just three hours. No one has been charged, and the “open investigation” appears non-existent. Bonnie’s mother Jennifer continues to struggle to come to terms with the loss of her daughter and the injustice that comes with investigating crime in “Indian Country”.
The crisis is put into a broader context by indigenous female scholars and experts, Annita Lucchessi and Sarah Deer. Annita Lucchesi has created the most comprehensive MMIW database in the world. She painstakingly works with families to accurately record data that has been missing from the records. As a cartographer, Annita uses the data to compile maps situating the names and stories of these women and girls in the ancestral lands in which they have been found or lost. A member of the Southern Cheyenne tribe, she considers the database a collective vessel of memories and spirits, thinking of herself and those who work with her as stewards of these spirits.
Sarah Deer is a Muscogee Creek legal scholar at the University of Kansas. Her foundational text, The Beginning and End of Rape, provides the legal, social, political, cultural, and historical contexts of the crisis. Sarah speaks to the sovereignty of the soul and the historical and physical trespass of violence against indigenous bodies.
We follow these families and combine their stories with insight from Annita and Sarah in order to paint a devastating picture of the reality that indigenous women are facing.
