Marie Clements knew the story of the 1950s federal relocation program belonged on screen long before she found a way to tell it. With How We Stand, the Canadian director and writer finally brings that history to American audiences, opening in theaters today, September 13, 2026.
The drama follows three Oklahoma sisters and their mother who leave for Los Angeles under a government initiative that promised Native Americans a path to becoming "civilized" through urban employment. What they find instead is a reality that betrays the dream, one that leaves them abandoned by the very policy that lured them west. Destitute and searching for something of their own, the family settles in "the tombs" - the concrete-lined riverways of Los Angeles. It is there that a young mother is killed, and the lives of her children splinter into three distinct directions across 1970s Los Angeles.
Clements has spent much of her career working across film, theater, and performance, often circling stories of Indigenous women and the forces that shape their lives. How We Stand may be her most sweeping canvas yet. "It's such an epic story," Clements said of the relocation era's long shadow. "You can't walk away from it - it's in our bones."
That sense of scale is built into the film's structure. Rather than follow a single timeline, the narrative moves between the family's arrival in Los Angeles and the divergent paths of the next generation in the 1970s. In Clements' hands, the break is both intimate and historical - one family torn apart, but also a community's displacement repeating itself across decades.
The filmmaker has been candid about the challenges of casting a period piece that spans two eras and centers Native performers at every turn. The production assembled a cast led by Amber Midthunder, Cara Jade Myers, Alyssa Wapanatâhk, and Isabel DeRoy-Olson, with Eric Johnson, Darren Mann, Gary Farmer, and Gil Bellows rounding out the ensemble. For Clements, the film's authenticity depended on actors who could carry both the vulnerability of the 1950s arrivals and the hardened resolve of their children in the 1970s.
The relocation program itself remains one of the least examined chapters of mid-century American policy. Presented as a jobs initiative, it encouraged Native families to leave reservations for cities like Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago. Many arrived to find inadequate housing, limited employment, and no meaningful support network - conditions that have been documented in oral histories and community archives but rarely dramatized on this scale.
Clements and her collaborators have talked about how the film's visual language grew out of the geography of the tombs. The cement channels - engineered to control floodwaters - became, for the family at the story's center, an unlikely refuge and eventually a site of tragedy. That duality runs through How We Stand: infrastructure as both constraint and shelter, a place where the promised new beginning collapses into something more complicated.
The film runs 107 minutes and is being positioned as a prestige drama heading into the fall season. Early tracking on review aggregate sites remains limited, with TMDb showing no audience rating yet, but the film's festival circuit whispers suggest Clements has delivered her most accessible work without sanding down its edges.
For Clements, the timing of the release matters. Debates over federal policy toward Indigenous communities, urban displacement, and who gets to tell whose story have only intensified since the relocation era. How We Stand doesn't pretend those debates are settled. It simply insists they began long before most audiences realize.
"It's such an epic story," she repeats - not as a marketing line, but as a reminder that the tombs, the sisters, the flood, and the telling are all part of one continuing narrative. How We Stand opens today in theaters nationwide.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter