Oppenheimer may have dominated this year’s Golden Globes awards, but Martin Scorsese’s opus, Killers Of The Flower Moon, had its moment too.
Last night, Lily Gladstone became the first ever indigenous person to win Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture at the Globes for their role as Mollie Burkhart in the epic drama, which is based on the true story of the Osage Nation story and David Grann's book of the same name.
In the film, the actor plays an Osage woman who – along with her family – is preyed upon by the murderous organised crime boss, William Hale. His nephew, the bumbling Ernest Burkhart [played by Leonardo DiCaprio], marries Mollie and conspires to kill her family and steal her inheritance.
In their speech, Gladstone, who is of Piegan Blackfeet descent and who grew up on the reservation of the Blackfeet Nation until she was 11, opened up by speaking in Blackfeet, before switching back to English, reminding people of the importance of this “historic win”. She later dedicated the award “for every rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream.”
Gladstone’s speech in full, following the Blackfeet introduction:
“I love everyone in this room right now. I don’t have words. I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language — the beautiful community, nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, doing this. I’m here with my mom, who, even though she’s not Blackfeet, worked tirelessly to get our language into our classroom, so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up.
“This award belongs to…and I hope I don’t get counted down as this is an historic one…I’m so grateful that 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 then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish native languages on camera. This is an historic win. It doesn’t belong to just me, I’m holding it right now, holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film, at this table over here — my mother Tantoo Cardinal, standing on all of your shoulders.
“Thank you Marty [Scorcese], Thank you Leo [DiCaprio], and thank you Bob [Robert De Niro]. You are all changing things, thank you for being such allies. Thank you Eric, thank you Chief Standing Bear, and [speaking in Osage, then thanks the Osage Nation].
“I'm at a loss for what else to say. Thank you to Apple. Thank you my manager and my agent, Jill and Sasha. Thank you to all of you. And this is for every rez 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 from with and from each other. So thank you all so much!”
