Canadian Indigenous director Marie Clements is premiering her drama "How We Stand" at the Toronto International Film Festival, revisiting the legacy of the 1950s US Native American Relocation Program through a fictional family's story. The film follows single mother Angela and her three daughters as they move from Oklahoma to Los Angeles seeking a better life, only to encounter poverty, racism and violence that shatter the family, matters because it confronts how government policy sought the cultural erasure of Native Americans while challenging the historical "Vanishing Indian" myth.

The film, adapted from Clements' stage play "Tombs of the Vanishing Indian," stars Cara Jade Myers as Angela and Amber Midthunder, Alyssa Wapanatâhk and Isabel DeRoy-Olson as her daughters, who are separated after tragedy and reunited in 1970s Los Angeles. It premieres on 13 September at TIFF, blending magical realism with Indigenous storytelling to depict each sister's later struggles, including forced sterilisation and misrepresentation in Hollywood westerns, while paying tribute to the activism of the 1970s.