Lily Gladstone Becomes First Native American to Be Nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards

Lily Gladstone (Blackfeet and Nimíipuu) has made history by becoming the first Native American actress to receive an Oscar nomination, and the fourth Indigenous actress overall, for her role in Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon."

In the film, Gladstone portrays Molly Burkhart, a real-life Osage woman at the center of the 1920s crime drama about the murders of Osage tribal members for their oil rights. Gladstone stars opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie.

This historic Oscar nomination follows another significant win for Gladstone earlier this month, when she became the first Indigenous person to win the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

During her Golden Globe acceptance speech, Gladstone began by speaking in the Blackfeet language before continuing in English. "I love everyone in this room right now, thank you. I don’t have words. I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language, the beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this. To 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."

She went on to highlight the significance of her win for Indigenous representation in film.

“... I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I’m not fluent enough here, because 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. This is an historic one. It doesn’t belong to just me. I’m holding it right now, I’m holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film and my mother [in the film], Tantoo Cardinal. I'm standing on all of your shoulders."

Three other Indigenous women have been nominated for the Academy Award for lead actress: Merle Oberon in 1936 for "The Dark Angel," Keisha Castle-Hughes in 2003 for "Whale Rider," and Yalitza Aparicio in 2019 for "Roma."

The 96th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 10 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.