Marie Clements knew that the story at the heart of How We Stand would not fit inside a single lifetime. The director's new drama, which opens in theaters today, traces three Oklahoma sisters and their mother as they join a 1950s federal relocation program that promised Native families jobs and respectability in urban America, only to strand them in Los Angeles with neither.
"It's such an epic story," Clements said of the film's sprawling timeline, which begins with the family's east-to-west journey and stretches into 1970s Los Angeles. "You have to find the human beings inside the history."
That history is the subject of the film's most demanding creative problem: casting. Filling the roles of the sisters, who are portrayed at different ages as the narrative leaps across two decades, required Clements to recast the same characters multiple times without losing the throughline of a family.
A Relocation Program That Promised Everything
How We Stand opens with the family's arrival in Los Angeles as part of a government initiative that gave Native Americans the opportunity to become, in the language of the era, "civilized" by taking jobs in urban centers. The pitch was a new beginning. The reality, as the film's synopsis puts it, is that the family is abandoned by the very policy that moved them and left in acute poverty.
The mother and her three daughters eventually find refuge in "the tombs" - the cemented riverways of Los Angeles, where a community of the displaced takes root. It is there that a young mother is killed, and the film pivots. Her children are scattered down three divergent paths that converge in 1970s Los Angeles, carrying a single telling and a single flood between them.
Clements described the tombs as more than a backdrop. For the family at the center of the film, the riverways represent the only home they can claim after the promises made to them evaporated.
The director anchored the production in what she called the "triangular story points" of the mother and her daughters, using the geography of Los Angeles as a structural device rather than mere scenery. The concrete channels that give the film its title image function as both shelter and trap, a place where a fragile community forms even as the surrounding city looks away.
A Cast Built Across Generations
Headlining the ensemble are Amber Midthunder, Cara Jade Myers, Alyssa Wapanatâhk, and Isabel DeRoy-Olson as the sisters and their mother, with Eric Johnson, Darren Mann, Gary Farmer, and Gil Bellows rounding out the cast. The recasting demands meant that multiple performers had to embody the same woman at different stages of her life - a challenge Clements framed as an opportunity to show how poverty and displacement shape a person over time rather than in a single moment.
Clements is no stranger to telling Native stories on her own terms. The Canadian filmmaker and playwright has spent her career moving between theater, documentary, and narrative features, and How We Stand arrives as one of the few studio-era releases this year to center Native women's experiences across a multi-decade span.
The film runs 107 minutes and is rated for mature audiences. It opens today, September 13, 2026.
A Drama of Policy and Its Aftermath
While How We Stand is fictional, its premise draws on the real federal relocation programs of the 1950s that moved thousands of Native Americans from reservations to cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver. The policy was framed as an offer of employment and assimilation; in practice, many participants arrived without housing, support networks, or the job placements they had been promised.
Clements said the film's title reflects the question the characters keep asking themselves as the years pass: how to stand when the ground beneath them was never theirs to begin with. The director declined to reduce the story to a single political message, describing it instead as a family chronicle that happens to unfold against a policy failure.
Critics and awards watchers have yet to weigh in; the film carries no rating on TMDb at the time of release. But its distributor is positioning How We Stand as a fall drama with awards-season ambitions, leaning on Clements's reputation and a cast that spans generations of Native performers.
For Clements, the reward is simpler. She said the story had waited decades to be told properly - and that the recasting, the riverways, and the long timeline were all in service of one thing: making sure the women at the center of it were seen as more than statistics.
Source: Hollywood Reporter