Lily Gladstone is officially a Golden Globe Award winner for her leading role in Killers of the Flower Moon, though she’s eager to insist the honor does not belong to her alone. After taking the stage to accept the statuette, Gladstone—one of ELLE’s 2023 Women in Hollywood honorees—spoke a few words in the Blackfeet language before continuing her speech in English.
“I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language, the beautiful community—the nation—that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this,” she told the audience. “You know, 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. ... 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 sounds mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera.”
Gladstone thanked numerous collaborators, friends, and advocates, including the Osage Nation, her co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, and Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese. “This is an historic [win], and it doesn’t belong to just me. I’m holding it right now,” she said, later finishing, “This is for every little 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, with and from each other. So thank you all so much.”
In her Women in Hollywood interview with ELLE last year, Gladstone revealed that she was initially worried about the attention Killers of the Flower Moon would bring her. “When I accepted this role, I knew that my life was going to be taking a very different turn and I would have a much bigger spotlight on me,” she said. “So far, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised that there’s way more love than hate out there. And that goes back to community. It’s been an incredible reminder of like, Okay, maybe all these things that I’ve been saying—that representation really matters, that seeing yourself represented gives you a sense of your place in the world [resonated with people]. So my anxiety went away when I started seeing all the love and excitement and support.”
