{"id":95563,"date":"2019-02-19T11:59:06","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T18:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/harvey-weinstein-and-a-broken-promise-in-indian-country\/"},"modified":"2019-02-19T11:59:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-19T18:59:06","slug":"harvey-weinstein-and-a-broken-promise-in-indian-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/harvey-weinstein-and-a-broken-promise-in-indian-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvey Weinstein and a broken promise in Indian Country"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Elizabeth
Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner in \u201cWind River.\u201d<\/span>The Weinstein Co.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

If all had gone according to plan, nearly every time someone were to watch Wind River, a 2017 film about the death of a Northern Arapaho woman on the Wind River Reservation, the National Indigenous Women\u2019s Resource Center would be paid. But the center says it has yet to receive any of that promised money, and it might never get it.<\/p>\n

So what went wrong? Harvey Weinstein.<\/p>\n

The National Indigenous Women\u2019s Resource Center in Lame Deer, Montana, supports work that combats the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. It advocates for jurisdictional sovereignty for tribes, supports Native-run hotlines and creates guides for tribal communities responding to missing persons cases. The agreement over the Wind River royalties was meant to acknowledge and support an organization that combats the kind of violence depicted in the film, as well as the kind for which the film\u2019s original distributor, Weinstein, was arrested.<\/p>\n

The New York Police Department arrested the film executive after multiple allegations of rape, sexual assault and sexual misconduct came to a head in October 2017. Many films associated with Weinstein\u2019s production outfit, The Weinstein Co., cut ties with him; Wind River, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, was one of them. In November 2017, Sheridan announced that all further distribution royalties \u2014 likely millions of dollars \u2013 when the film is picked up by Netflix, shown on airplanes or sold by Redbox \u2014 would go to the National Indigenous Women\u2019s Resource Center.<\/p>\n

But in February 2018, The Weinstein Co. filed for bankruptcy, forfeiting its obligation to the royalty agreement. In July, Texas-based Lantern Entertainment acquired the assets. Lantern isn\u2019t bound by the arrangement, and, as the resource center wrote, \u201cIt remains unclear whether it will voluntarily honor the agreement.\u201d The royalty agreement should have been a silver lining to the Weinstein\u2019s saga, but, instead, his actions helped terminate it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all somewhat disappointing,\u201d said Lucy Simpson, executive director of the National Indigenous Women\u2019s Resource Center. \u201cI think we still have some hopes that that\u2019s something that might happen.\u201d After the agreement was announced, other organizations wondered how the center would use the promised funds. That, Simpson said, is the reason the group wanted to publicize the defunct agreement \u2014 to let people know that the money was never available to them.<\/p>\n

Wind River opens with the death of an 18-year-old woman and follows the two white law enforcement agents who tackle the case despite jurisdictional issues and hang-ups. While the film has been lauded for illustrating the real-life struggles in Indian Country, it\u2019s also been criticized for the \u201cwhite savior\u201d complex of its main characters. Jason Asenap, in a review for High Country News, wrote that \u201cWind River does its best to avoid clich\u00e9s, and say something new. Yet while it\u2019s great to see Native people portrayed with some depth, they are, for the most part, incredibly sad and, in the case of some, dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s a history of Hollywood of appropriating our stories,\u201d Simpson said. When it comes to Wind River, she is grateful that director Taylor Sheridan used his film to explicitly raise awareness of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. But she\u2019s not optimistic about the phantom funds.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re used to doing a lot with a little,\u201d she said of her organization. \u201cWe move on and keep doing what we\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was first published on hcn.org on Feb. 7.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Royalties from \u2018Wind River\u2019 haven\u2019t reached the National Indigenous Women\u2019s Resource Center<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[561],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-95563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-native-american"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95563"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=95563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}