It’s been exceedingly rare for Indigenous actors to play lead roles in Hollywood, even more so for prestige, awards-contending projects. As such, it should be of little surprise that Lily Gladstone’s 2024 Golden Globe win makes her the first Indigenous actor to win an award in the ceremony’s 81-year history.
In taking home best actress in a motion picture, drama for their role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Gladstone (Blackfeet/Nimíipuu) makes history as the only Indigenous person to take home a Golden Globe. Irene Bedard is the only other actor to previously receive a nomination — for best actress in a miniseries or TV movie for 1994’s Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee — while director Taika Waititi was recognized for Jojo Rabbit’s best musical/comedy film nomination in 2020 and Reservation Dogs was nominated for best musical/comedy series in 2022.
“This is a historic one, and it doesn’t belong to just me,” said Gladstone in English, after opening her acceptance speech speaking in the Blackfeet language. “I’m holding it with all of my beautiful sisters in the film and my mother [in the film], Tantoo Cardinal.”
A recent research brief from USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that among the 1,600 highest-grossing movies from the past 16 years, just one featured a Native American protagonist. And among the 62,224 speaking characters within that sampling, just 133 were Native (but 34 of those roles were played by non-Native actors).
In acknowledging her appreciation for being able to speak even a little of Blackfeet (thanks to her white mother’s efforts to ensure she had a Blackfeet language teacher in school), Gladstone noted that Hollywood used to invent Native tongues instead of depicting them accurately and authentically: “I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language because in this business, Native actors used to speak their lines in English and then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera.”
Gladstone’s 2024 Golden Globes-winning performance saw the actor, who uses she/they pronouns, portraying Mollie Burkhart, a real-life Osage woman who was married to a key accomplice of the systematic murders of Osage people in the 1920s. The role was originally three scenes long until Scorsese and Eric Roth reframed the story. Gladstone, who speaks both Osage and English throughout the film, first earned critical attention in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 drama Certain Women but was on the brink of leaving the industry before booking Killers. She has been at the center of the awards conversation all season, with wins at the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle, all while supporting Native critics of the film who find it too traumatizing to watch.
Added Gladstone — who thanked Chief Standing Bear and the Osage Nation as well as Scorsese, her Killers co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro, and co-screenwriter Eric Roth for being allies — “This is for every little res kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream, who is seeing themselves represented and our stories told by ourselves, in our own words, with tremendous allies and tremendous trust with each other.”
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