Hollywood has a long history of otherizing or simply excluding Native American and other Indigenous populations, a sad truth that made Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone’s win for best actress in a motion picture (drama) category at the 81st Annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday night all the more poignant.
Gladstone, who is of Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce, and European heritage and grew up on the Montana reservation of the Blackfeet Nation, is the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress. “This is a historic win. It doesn’t belong to just me,” the actor said, addressing the crowd at the Beverly Hilton in the Blackfeet language for the first time in the award show’s history before thanking their mother for “work[ing] tirelessly to get our language into our classroom so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up.
“I’m so grateful I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I’m not fluent in, up here, because, in this business, Native actors used to speak their lines in English, and the sound mixer would run them backwards to accomplish native languages on camera,” Gladstone continued. They added, “This is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream and is seeing themselves represented in our stories told by ourselves, in our own words, with tremendous allies and tremendous trust from within, from each other.” Hopefully, this win is just the first in a series of award-show-season recognitions for Gladstone, not to mention the many other deserving Indigenous actors currently helping to transform the entertainment industry.
