Young starlet died5/18/2023 ![]() The roles kept coming: Edge of America, Expiration Date, Frozen River, Big Love, Django Unchained. At the age of 20, she appeared in her first feature, Skins. She would express pain or angst, but not self-pity.”ĭespite being told by her first drama teacher to find another line of work, “she kept at it for five years, writing, directing, acting, finding her way in performance,” her father said.Įventually, Misty was filmed auditioning in Seattle. Renville said Misty “exemplified Indian persistence. Not just any actress – the best.įern Renville (Sisseton Wahpeton) is the managing director of Red Eagle Soaring, the Native theatre group that gave Misty her start. It was fresh from that experience that Misty summoned the courage to declare her hopes to the world. She threw up repeatedly until stomach acids ate her teeth and forced her to use dentures. During her time on the reservation, Misty became infected with the H pylori bacterium, common to places without clean water and proper sewage control and causing stomach ulcers. While her parents tried, they were not able to protect her from being damaged by her environment. When those didn’t work, she cut herself, leaving dozens of small scars on her forearms. She fought to control them with prescribed medications and alcohol, both of which she abused. On the red carpet, on set, alone in her hotel rooms, Misty was afflicted by panic attacks that began when she was a teen. More than one in three Native women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, a rate 2.5 times higher than other US women. Heather Rae (Cherokee), a film producer who was Misty’s friend, said she “talked about having been abused as a young age, someone close to the family, that started when she was very young and continued.” Because of these traumas, Rae said, Misty was “extraordinarily sensitive and contended with high levels of anxiety” throughout her life. But the physical is nothing compared to the mental. The fear of having someone hold you down, the cheering and the laughter. In it, she wrote:įirst there is the physical pain and never being able to forget it. She wrote about the physical and emotional legacy on her blog, The Struggles and Triumphs of a Blackfeet Native With a Dream, which was made private after her death. Misty would later talk openly about being gang raped on the reservation when she was 13. They invited Misty to watch some horses being broken, 20 kids out there. Their relative comfort worked against them once housing circumstances obliged them to return to the Blackfeet reservation, where jobs are hard to come by. Misty was crying to me, asking, ‘What bugs?’ And I said, ‘She probably thinks we have lice.’ Let me tell you, my kids were very clean and well dressed.” “Then her friend said they couldn’t be friends anymore, because her mom didn’t want to her to get bugs. “She had a friend who used to play with her and have her over at her house – until her mom found out that Misty was Native,” Charles recalls. ![]() ![]() Misty found out the hard way in the city of Billings, where her family moved so her father could pursue his college degree in music education. That people were racist, and that we lived under this stigma of alcoholism and being uneducated.” I told the kids that they were going to learn that there is a stigma associated with being an American Indian. “I was determined to take my kids away from the reservation, where so many young people fail out, to a place where they could get an education, have a grounding experience. ![]() Still, Charles Upham wanted better for his children than reservation life. Her father was a music teacher, her mother a homemaker and occasional entrepreneur they raised their three children as evangelical Christians.īoth of her parents were sent to boarding schools under a federal policy that eroded indigenous cultural and linguistic ties across the country. Photograph: Mike Kane for The Guardianīorn on 6 July 1982, Misty grew up in Montana and Washington, moving on and off the Blackfeet reservation according to her family’s financial needs. Charles Upham looks down the ravine where Misty Upham’s body was found. ![]()
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