Lily Gladstone Makes Oscars History as First Native American Best Actress Nominee
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Lily Gladstone has made Oscar history. The actress became the first Native American woman to be nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards on Tuesday after she was recognized for her role in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. She stars as Osage woman and historical figure Mollie Burkhart in the epic.
If she wins, she will be the first indigenous actress to do so in this category.
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The nomination comes less than a month after the actress made history at the 2024 Golden Globes, becoming the first indigenous woman to win a Best Actress at the awards ceremony. After a standing ovation from the audience, Gladstone began her acceptance speech with a few words in the Blackfeet language, the “beautiful community and nation” that raised the actress, as she put it a few moments later. She then thanked her mom, who’s not Blackfeet, but “worked tirelessly to get our language into our classrooms so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up.”
Gladstone acknowledged the historic moment of her victory, as well as Hollywood’s long history of failing to properly portray, or offer genuine representation to, indigenous communities. “I’m so grateful I can speak even a little bit of my language — which I’m not fluent enough in — up here, because in this business, Native actors used to speak their lines in English, and then the sound mixers would run them backward to accomplish Native languages on camera.”
She continued: ‘’This is a historic win, it doesn’t belong to just me, I’m holding it right now — I’m holding it with all of my beautiful sisters in the film, and my mother… I’m standing on all of your shoulders.”
In order to take home the Academy Award at this year’s ceremony, the actress will have to beat out fellow contenders, including Carey Mulligan (Maestro), Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), Emma Stone (Poor Things), and Annette Bening (Nyad).
But even before the nominations were announced on Tuesday, Gladstone has been raking in awards and acclaim for performance in Killers of the Flower Moon. The performance was among one of Rolling Stone’s favorites of 2023, giving Martin Scorsese’s epic its “broken-hearted pulse and backbone.”
In real life, and in the movie, Gladstone’s character Burkhart married Ernest Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a white man who murdered several members of the Osage Nation as part of a larger plot to take over the oil rights on their land. Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce descent, has expressed great pride in the film, and especially all the contributions made by various members of the Osage Nation, but remained frank about the film’s violence and brutality.
Indigenous women have rarely been recognized in the Lead Actress category. Now along with Gladstone, Yalitza Aparicio, who is Indigenous Mexican, received a best actress nomination at the 2019 Oscars, while Keisha Castle-Hughes, who is a New Zealander of Maori descent, was nominated for Whale Rider in 2003.
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