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- By Native News Online Staff
Breaking News. History was made on Sunday night when Lily Gladstone (Blackfeet and Nimíipuu) became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe. She won the award for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon.
During her acceptance speech, the 37-year-old actress spoke in Blackfeet, then said 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.
“… 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."
She thanked the film's director, Martin Scorcese, her co-stars Leonardo Dicaprio and Robert Deniro, as well as Chief Standing Bear and the Osage Nation.
She finished her speech by saying, "This is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid 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. Thank you all so much."
Gladstone's Golden Globe Award was for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture. She beat out her competitors for the award, including Annette Bening (Nyad), Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), Greta Lee (Past Lives), Carey Mulligan (Maestro) and Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla).
RELATED: “Killers of the Flower Moon” Tells One More Epic Tragedy Against Native Americans
KIllers of the Flower Moon was nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards, but Gladstone's award was the only one received for the flim.
The movie unveils the story of the Osage, who, because of oil on their allotted lands in Oklahoma, became some of the world’s wealthiest people on a per capita basis. During the 1920s, dozens of Osage died under mysterious circumstances. In many cases, those circumstances turned out to be murder. The film concentrates on the family of Mollie Burkhart.
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