Will Lily Gladstone’s Indigenous heritage help her in the Oscar Best Actress race?
You may have noticed that there’s been a lot of talk about Lily Gladstone and her Indigenous heritage and what that fact will mean for her chances in the Academy Award Best Actress race as her epic feature “Killers of the Flower Moon” from director Martin Scorsese preps for liftoff in wide theatrical release this Friday (October 20). Gladstone is running a solid second place behind Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) in the Gold Derby combined Oscar odds for her much-praised performance as Osage Nation member Mollie Burkhart in the tragic fact-based saga.
Gladstone herself is of Blackfeet and Nimiipuu heritage and raised on a Blackfeet Nation reservation in Montana. One would presume this fact won’t work against the actress in 2024 as it might have in, say, 1954 or even ’74. And in fact it was only earlier this year that Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win Best Actress for her work in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Might Gladstone become the first Indigenous actress to emerge victorious?
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The past provides us with few clues. In fact, the most famed person claiming to be Indigenous ever to appear at the Oscars was on behalf of someone rejecting the award: the late Sacheen Littlefeather, the actress and activist who was enlisted by Marlon Brando in 1973 to protest the film industry’s treatment of the American Indian and refuse the trophy. (Following Littlefeather’s death last year, her sisters came forward to claim the family in fact had no Indigenous roots and that Littlefeather – born Maria Louise Cruz – completely fabricated her Native American ancestry.)
There have been just three performers to receive Oscar bids in the Best Actress category, and one of those did her best to conceal this fact. The first was Merle Oberon, nominated in 1936 for “The Dark Angel.” Oberon struggled to make sure the truth about her background never surfaced during her career, concerned that it would hold her back. So she tried to pass as white, claiming to have been born in Tasmania, Australia and that her actual birth records had been destroyed in a fire. In fact, she was conceived as the result of a rape of her biological mother by a man with Maori ancestry.
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The other Best Actress nominees with an Indigenous background are Keisha Castle-Hughes, also a Maori, who was just 13 years old (the youngest ever in the category at the time) for “Whale Rider” in 1973; and Yalitza Aparicio in 2018 for “Roma.” There has never been an Indigenous male nominated for Best Actor, but two have been honored with noms for supporting actor: Chief Dan George for “Little Big Man” in 1970 and Graham Greene 20 years later (1990) for “Dances with Wolves.” The only Native American performer to land a nomination for Best Supporting Actress was Jocelyne LaGarde for “Hawaii” in 1966.
If we don’t count Wes Studi (a member of the Cherokee Nation) being bestowed an Honorary Award in 2019 (the only Indigenous person to be so honored), there have been just two winners with Indigenous blood: Buffy Sainte-Marie taking the Best Original Song statuette in 1982 for the tune “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman,” and Taika Waititi carting off the Best Adapted Screenplay prize in 2019 for “Jojo Rabbit.” Waititi and fellow producer Chelsea Winstanley also earned Best Picture noms for “Jojo Rabbit,” while Waititi (writer-director) and Ainsley Gardiner (writer-producer) earned a Best Live Action Short Film bid in 2004 for “Two Cars, One Night.”
Finally, Nils Gaup was part of the team that made the Norwegian movie “Pathfinder” that earned a 1987 Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
And that’s pretty much all of the Indigenous representation at the Oscars. A Gladstone win would open a door that has remained mostly shut tight for the better part of a century.
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