During the Sunday Golden Globes ceremony, Lily Gladstone created history by being the first Indigenous person to win best performance by a female actor in a dramatic motion picture.
Gladstone won for her role in the movie “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which was directed by Martin Scorsese and starred Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“This is an historic one. It doesn’t belong to just me. I’m holding it right now, holding it with all my beautiful sisters,” she said during her speech.
Blackfeet Nation is the “beautiful community, nation that raised me and encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this,” Gladstone continued, speaking first in Blackfeet.
“My mom, even though she’s not Blackfeet, worked tirelessly to get our language into our classrooms so I had a Blackfeet English teacher growing up,” she said, paying tribute to her mother who went with her to the ceremony on Sunday.
Gladstone said she was thankful to be able to speak “a little bit” of her mother tongue because “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 concluded her statement by mentioning the Osage Nation, the topic of “Flower Moon,” and stating that children who have “seen themselves represented in our stories told by ourselves in our own words, with tremendous allies and tremendous trust” are the recipients of this award.
Gladstone told The Guardian in 2017 that she was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana and that she had lived there until she was eleven years old. She is a member of the Kainai, Amskapi Piikani, and Nimi’ipuu First Nations tribes.
She portrays Mollie Burkhart in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an Osage woman and Ernest Burkhart’s spouse played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Gladstone received his first nomination and win at the Globes.