In a history-making triumph, Lily Gladstone has become the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, said a spokesman for the organization that hands out the awards.
Gladstone played Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose family members are murdered as part of a plot to take their fortune, in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Gladstone, whose background is Blackfeet and Nez Percé, is only the second Native actress to receive any recognition from the Globes: Irene Bedard was nominated in 1995 for “Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee,” a television movie.
After an ovation, an overcome Gladstone spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language, then said, “I don’t have words.”
As for whether Gladstone is the first Indigenous person to win a Globe overall, that is unclear. The singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, who has said she was born to an Indigenous woman, won a Golden Globe in 1983 for the song “Up Where We Belong” from the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman.” But her heritage has recently been disputed.
There have been other Indigenous nominees. This year, the late musician Robbie Robertson, who was Mohawk and Cayuga, was nominated for original score for “Killers.” Going further back, Chief Dan George was nominated for the 1970 comic western “Little Big Man” and Adam Beach for the 2007 television adaptation “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”
“Killers,” based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, was reconceived early on to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is engaged in the conspiracy to kill her relatives.