Blackfeet finds a champion in Gladstone
BROWNING, Montana: Rence Champ stayed up late to watch the glittery Hollywood ceremony, a world away from the frigid, rural landscape where the touslehaired third-grader lives.
He was rewarded with something astonishing: a woman in sparkling jewels and a strapless gown, clutching a trophy and speaking a language he’d never heard on television – a language he studies at school, a language he understands.
The boy proudly translated for his mother the words that Lily Gladstone spoke after becoming the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, announcing to all that she hailed from the Blackfeet Nation here, where sprawling prairies meet jagged mountains known commonly as the crown of the continent and to the tribe as the backbone of the earth.
“I was like, wow, she talked in front of people, like New Yorkans and lots of people, and that would help us for our Blackfoot language to go back up,” Rence said, sitting on a colorful classroom carpet where he and other children had just finished a vocabulary game of Blackfoot “Jeopardy!”
Gladstone’s success at the Golden Globes in early January – and her embrace of her heritage and language – is having a profound impact on this reservation hard up against the Canadian border. The tribe’s business council is deciding how to formally honor the actress, who this week became the first American Indian nominated for a best actress Oscar for her role as an Osage woman in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Academy Awards watch parties are being planned for early March.
Nowhere is the Gladstone effect felt more deeply than in Browning Public Schools, which in recent years has pushed to revitalize the endangered Blackfoot language using a novel writing system. Words from her acceptance speech – “this is for every little rez kid” – are written on a whiteboard in a high school classroom. First-graders at Bullshoe Elementary made a TikTok video thanking her for her bravery.
Photos of Gladstone adorn a bulletin board in the office of Blackfeet Native American studies director Robert Hall, who grew up in Browning and has been hailed locally since the actress told reporters he was a “good friend” who had taught her
Blackfoot words.
“Lily Gladstone speaking Blackfoot up on that stage is a victory. It’s saying: I’m still alive,” said Hall, now busy fielding inquiries about the language from newly interested students and teachers.
“This isn’t just a symbolic action. This is something that is tangible and has created change.”
Blackfoot could use a prominent champion like Gladstone, who seems to be everyone’s friend, cousin or friend’s cousin here.
Like many Native American languages in the United States and Canada, it fell victim to government violence and forced assimilation at boarding schools where Indigenous children were penalized for speaking their native tongues.
Data is scarce, but Hall estimates that just a few dozen people speak fluent Blackfoot on the reservation in Montana; most are elderly.
Several hundred people fluent in the language reside in Canada, he said, where three other tribal nations form the rest of what is known as the Blackfoot Confederacy.
Though the language has been offered for years in local schools, generations of trauma affected its instruction: Because reading and writing were associated with boarding schools, Blackfoot was passed down and taught orally. Teachers long used whatever spelling they devised, leading to inconsistency.
The sound and sight of Blackfoot
“You don’t hear the Blackfoot Language.”
“The White peoples swindled us.”
“But these days, the ability to speak Blackfoot is a good thing.”
“Not many people speak the real talk.”
“But these days, we have come to know the truth - that our mother tongue is sacred.”
For some Blackfeet, hearing the language “is like hearing a lullaby” and depicting it using English letters “is almost a disservice,” Hall said.
He runs a language revitalization nonprofit with a cousin and a Canadian Blackfeet man, William Big Bull, who developed the writing system that Browning students are using.
Today, the district has a fat binder of lesson plans and a vocabulary assessment. In the office Hall shares with the Native American studies instructional coach, bins hold lesson props for teachers. One on “iinnii,” the buffalo long revered and relied on by Blackfeet, holds a box made of thick bison hide, a Ziploc bag of dried dung, and a beard, tail and teeth. A Blackfeet history class is a high school graduation requirement.
The effort, which is mostly grant funded, is a bright spot on a reservation where roughly a third of some 10,000 residents live in poverty, opioid addiction is dire, and schools are struggling to pull themselves out of the lowest-performing tier in Montana.
About 190 students participate in a K-8 Blackfoot immersion program – learning history, culture and design as well as language – and all students in every grade are exposed to the language through special classes.
The 18 Blackfoot teachers include Kevin Kickingwoman, who in September was named Montana’s teacher of the year.
Another is Angel Marceau, who has awed her Napi Elementary fifth-graders with memories of playing Barbies with Gladstone when they were children in East Glacier Park, 15 minutes west of Browning, the reservation’s largest town.
On a recent minus-15-degree morning, Marceau’s students lined up in her cozy classroom before a wooden “smudge box” in which she had lit sweet grass.
One by one, they wafted smoke over themselves as they recited in unison a blessing in Blackfoot. Its words translate to “Amen, holy beings, water beings. Help us so that we may know our Blackfeet ways.”
Superintendent Corrina Guardipee-Hall grew up in Browning but was never taught the language – and as the child of only one Blackfeet parent, she never considered herself Native until she reached her 30s.
Through the program, she said, she has gained the confidence to introduce herself in Blackfoot as “Pretty Woman,” the Indian name an aunt gave her as a toddler.
Gladstone’s speech at the Golden Globes was another boost.
“It was such a validation that what we’re doing is working,” Guardipee-Hall said. “She gave us such a powerful gift.”
The buzz about the 37-yearold actress’s triumphs keeps growing, with celebratory memes and tributes taking over a corner
of Indian social media.
A TikTok video of Browning child-care provider Dakota Running Crane’s family bursting into cheers during their Globes watch party has been viewed more than 159,000 times.
Running Crane calls himself Gladstone’s “number one fan.” He and his relatives dressed up and drove two hours to Great Falls to see “Killers of the Flower Moon,” because Browning has no theater.
“I think all of Indian country together was crying,” he said, “just because we all felt we were finally seen.”
Gladstone, whose father is Blackfeet and Nez Percé, lived in Browning until kindergarten and her family’s move to East Glacier Park. It was in the tiny K-8 school there that she was exposed to acting through the Missoula Community Theatre, which every year spends a week helping the student body put on a production.
“It’s so exciting seeing someone become successful from a small town on the reservation,” said Shayna Schildt, the principal of the 48-student East Glacier Park Grade School, where she and Gladstone were classmates together. “She was full of energy. She made her presence known.”
It was also at that school, Gladstone said at the Globes, that she was first taught Blackfoot. Her mother, Betty PeaceGladstone, who is not Blackfeet, worked with other parents to recruit a teacher for occasional lessons.
“It was really important to me that the schools reflect where they were and the kids who were Blackfeet in the schools got a sense of who they were,” Peace-Gladstone recalled in an interview. And given how Hollywood has long excluded Native actors, she is “especially proud” now as she watches her daughter use her platform to promote Indigenous representation on screen as well as Native designers.
The family moved to the Seattle area when Gladstone was 11, but her mother said she still views the reservation as home. Gladstone met Hall at the University of Montana, where both pursued Native American studies. Hall also focused on anthropology and linguistics and became fascinated by Blackfoot – a verb-based, gender-neutral language.
He dedicated himself to it, eventually returning to Browning to teach and host Blackfoot-language radio shows.
Last May, he texted Gladstone. She was going to win awards for this new Martin Scorsese film, he told her, and he would be happy to help her brush up on Blackfoot if she wanted. She accepted, and on Jan 7, he wept as he watched Gladstone snag her historic win.
Hall learned Gladstone had mentioned him following the ceremony when his phone began dinging with texts. He had taught her a word, the actress told reporters, that nerves caused to slip her mind. It was – a form of “thank you” that means “I feel the goodness in what you have done.”
An Oscars watch party is being planned for Browning High, where on a recent day students in Kickingwoman’s Blackfoot class were practicing their own acting skills through a game of Blackfoot-language charades.
As Sadailyah Momberg struggled to act out her phrase “sleeping mouse,” or in Blackfoot – a boy joked that “Lily Gladstone would not be proud!”
After class, the 17-year-old said she hopes to become fluent in the language to speak with her grandmother, with whom she watched “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
“It feels like home,” she said. “It’s ours. It’s our culture, and not anyone else’s.”