Lily Gladstone’s Golden Globe Win Felt Like A Reckoning
Lily Gladstone’s 2024 Golden Globe win for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for her role as Mollie Kyle in Killers of the Flower Moon is significant not only for herself but for all of us Indigenous people around the world.
Lily’s win (in her first-ever Golden Globe nomination) makes her the first Indigenous woman to win the award for best actress in a drama. The win, along with her acceptance speech, felt like the beginning of something powerful. To me, it felt like the start of a reckoning in Hollywood where Indigenous people will finally have our voices heard and we will be the ones telling our stories.
I couldn’t help but get emotional as I heard Lily Gladstone speak in her native Blackfeet language at the beginning of her speech. She thanked her mother for fighting to get the language into “our classroom so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up”.
“I’m so grateful 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 the sound mixer would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera,” Lily said.
Language is a very important tool that colonisers have long weaponised against Indigenous communities around the world. Here in Australia, the government enacted the White Australia Policy to allow for the removal of Indigenous children of mixed descent from their homes to strip them of their culture and “assimilate” them into white Australia. They taught Indigenous children English and punished them if they spoke their own language. It meant that a majority of Indigenous languages in Australia were wiped out. It’s a very similar experience that Indigenous communities around the world faced, including that of Lily’s ancestors.
That’s why Lily Gladstone speaking in language is monumental. Not just the speech, but the win itself. Indigenous people often carry the weight of not just themselves but their ancestors and their communities on our backs. Not only do we represent ourselves but everyone around us. Representation is still so marginal that when one of us achieves something, we all do. That’s why watching Lily Gladstone’s acceptance speech moved me to tears. Even though our Indigenous communities are thousands of kilometres apart, we share the same trauma of colonisation and battle the same fight for land and language rights. That’s why Lily said her win “doesn’t belong to just me” because it belongs to her “beautiful sisters in the film” and her mother, it belongs to “every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there 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”.
Something feels very iconic in the fact that the only award the film won at the Golden Globes out of its seven nominations was by a Native American woman. I just hope Lily Gladstone doesn’t become a lone figure in her historic win. I hope we see many other Indigenous women and creatives winning awards for telling the truth about their history. After years of horrific portrayals of Native Americans, I hope Lily stands proud as the turning point.
Ky is a proud Kamilaroi and Dharug person and writer at Junkee. Follow them on Instagram or on X.
Image credit: Getty