TULALIP — Four years ago this month, Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis was last seen walking along Fire Trail Road on the north end of the Tulalip Reservation.
Her family has been searching for her ever since. Their story, along with the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, is told in the new documentary “Missing from Fire Trail Road.”
On Sunday, after trips to the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival and others across the country, the documentary came home for the first time. Director Sabrina Van Tassel showed the 100-minute film to a few hundred viewers at the Orca Ballroom in the Tulalip Resort Casino.
“Missing from Fire Trail Road” is set to be screened 7 p.m. Monday at the Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle’s University District. On Thursday, it will also be shown at 5:30 p.m. at the Pickford Film Center in Bellingham. It can also be rented on Amazon Prime Video for $2.99 and purchased via Apple TV+ for $9.99. It is also available through Google Play and Microsoft’s streaming service.
The documentary tracks Johnson-Davis’ life — from surviving sexual abuse as a child in foster care to a marriage to a cruel husband and her eventual disappearance on Nov. 25, 2020 — as just one example of the intergenerational trauma unique to Native American communities.
Van Tassel, the French-American director, traced that trauma to federal boarding schools, including one on the Tulalip Reservation where abuse was meant to eradicate Native culture. The Tulalip Tribes’ Chair Teri Gobin and historian Tessa Campbell talk in the documentary about how these schools shaped trauma across generations of Indigenous communities.
Deborah Parker, a Tulalip tribal member and CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, is an executive producer of the documentary and also appears in it. Parker recently traveled with President Joe Biden to Arizona, where he apologized for the country’s role in the boarding schools.
Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis
A list maintained by the Washington State Patrol shows dozens of missing Indigenous people in Washington, including some who disappeared as long ago as the 1990s. In 2022, the state launched an alert system for missing Indigenous people to notify other police agencies and the community to be on the lookout.
A survey of 148 Native women in Seattle found 94% had been raped or coerced, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute. And 86% reported being affected by historical trauma.
“We want to make sure our children are protected, the women that mean the world to us are protected, ” Parker said after the screening. “Our community deserves to feel safe.”
Johnson-Davis’ sisters, Nona Blouin and Gerry Davis, attended the screening in Tulalip, and thanked the crowd for coming to hear their sister’s story. Johnson-Davis was 39 when she went missing.
Gerry Davis poses for a photo at Hillcrest Park in Mount Vernon on May 29. (Annie Barker / The Herald)
The new Tulalip Tribal Police Department chief, Shawn Ledford, told the crowd Tulalip police, along with the FBI, were still pursuing leads related to Johnson-Davis’ disappearance.
“We want to solve this, we want to bring Mary home,” said Ledford, a Tulalip tribal member. He said police can keep tipsters anonymous and safe.
The FBI and Tulalip Tribes are offering a combined $60,000 reward to anyone who provides information leading to an arrest and conviction in Johnson-Davis’ case. If you have information, contact the police department at 360-716-5918. The case number is 20-3063.
Jake Goldstein-Street: 425-339-3439; jake.goldstein-street@heraldnet.com; X: @GoldsteinStreet.
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