Native American Shares Spotlight With Others
In college, Lily Gladstone studied the history of Native American actors in Hollywood. Now, she is making it.
The 37-year-old actress stars in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a Martin Scorsese-directed drama in which she plays Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose relatives are systematically murdered by her husband (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle (Robert De Niro) in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land.
That portrayal has earned Gladstone a best-actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Golden Globes, and she has been nominated for the upcoming Academy Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Gladstone has also been hotly pursued for round tables and events, and she has taken to those opportunities with such command — using her platform to amplify other Native voices and concerns — that you would never know she was not used to this, or that for a long time, she was hesitant to engage with Hollywood at all.
“This has been like being shot out of a cannon,” Gladstone said. “My dad’s a boilermaker, my mom was a teacher. I was raised on a reservation, went to public school.”
Gladstone is the first Native American to be nominated for the best actress Academy Award. With a win, she would become the first Native performer to earn a competitive acting Oscar.
At an Elle event in December celebrating women in Hollywood, Gladstone was honored alongside Jennifer Lopez, America Ferrera and Jodie Foster, but she particularly was thrilled to meet the academic Stacy L. Smith, whose University of Southern California think tank, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, had recently issued a report about Native American representation in Hollywood. After analyzing 1,600 films released from 2007 to 2022, Smith found that the amount of speaking roles for Native American actors was less than one quarter of 1 percent of all the roles cataloged.
A leading role like Gladstone’s in a film the size of “Killers” is unprecedented, so much so that Smith subtitled her report, “The Lily Gladstone Effect.” Gladstone acknowledged that the intensity of the awards-season spotlight can sometimes feel overwhelming. “I know that all of this attention on me right now means so much more than just me,” she said.
As a child on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, there was one week that Gladstone looked forward to all year, when the Missoula Children’s Theater would come to the reservation and cast local kids in a production that the whole community would come out to see. “I was bullied a lot when I was a kid,” Gladstone said. “But that one week a year is when I was cool.”
She spent her postgraduate years in Montana, doing theater and renting out basements with like-minded performers. Though Gladstone was unsure about coming to Hollywood, in the end, Hollywood came to her.
“I know myself, and I know I’m difficult to cast,” Gladstone said. Part of it is that she is mixed-race: Her father is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, her mother white. But there is another part, too. “It’s kind of being middle-gendered, I guess,” said Gladstone, who uses both “she” and “they” pronouns. “I’ve always known I’m comfortable claiming being a woman, but I never feel more than when I’m in a group of all women that I’m not fully this either.”
After “Killers” received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival in May, a clip of Gladstone’s moved reaction to the applause earned millions of views.
“I think people root for folks that come up from the grass roots having this global-stage moment, this dream coming true,” she said. “That’s something that I wish on everybody at some point in their lives, in whatever form that takes, and also for Native people.”
Gladstone confessed that she had watched the Cannes clip “a thousand times.” But the moment was about more than just her: She recalled her Native co-star William Belleau letting out a whooping war cry during the ovation and how the applause for the women playing her sisters — Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins and Jillian Dion — prompted Gladstone to let out a trilling lele. It was not just a celebration. It was a release.
“Whatever that oppressive system is that sometimes develops with colonial governments, that moment of transcendence for all of us, those are the healing moments,” Gladstone said. “Those are the ones that show people very clearly that we’re still here and we’re excellent.”