Lily Gladstone creates history, becomes first Indigenous woman to win Golden Globe for best actress drama

Actor Lily Gladstone created history as the first Indigenous woman to win the Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture drama for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”. This was the first nomination for the 37-year-old, who played the real-life Mollie Kyle, whose family and community in the Osage Nation of 1920s Oklahoma were the targets of serial killings. Gladstone opened her award acceptance speech in the Blackfeet language, an Algonquian language spoken by the Blackfoot or Niitsitapi people in Montana, US. The actor termed the win as “a historic one” that doesn’t belong to only her. “I love everyone in this room. I don’t have words. I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language, a beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this 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 is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid who has a dream and is seeing themselves represented in our stories told by ourselves, in our own words, with tremendous allies and tremendous trust from within, from each other,” she said. Gladstone thanked Scorsese and her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, adding “You are all changing things. Thank you for being such allies.” She further said she is grateful to be able to speak even a little bit of Blackfeet, which she’s not fluent in. “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… It (the award) doesn’t belong to just me. I’m holding it right now. I’m holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film,” she added. Other nominees in the Golden Globe best actress in a motion picture drama category were: Carey Mulligan for “Maestro”, Sandra Huller for “Anatomy of a Fall”, Annette Bening for “Nyad”, Greta Lee for “Past Lives” and Cailee Spaeny for “Priscilla”.