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Renata Birkenbuel
ICT
After snagging the win for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role at the peer-driven Screen Actors Guild Awards on Saturday, Lily Gladstone still manages to celebrate her Siksikaitsitapii and Nimíipuu culture in the midst of a hectic Hollywood awards season.
Gladstone’s in-grained values shine a light on storytelling, cultural language, sovereignty, balance, teamwork and empathy.
Holistic, thoughtful and inclusive, she champions education, namely her educator mother’s teachings, despite the intense glare of Hollywood. Betty Peace-Gladstone, a long-time Headstart and special education teacher, and Lily’s father, Howard Gladstone, cast a lasting influence on their successful daughter.
Since her daughter’s critically acclaimed performance as long-suffering Osage wife Mollie Burkhart in “Killers of the Flower Moon” – one 5th-grade lesson in particular has come full circle.
“You know, there was a year where I home-schooled and she helped create my curriculum and we built it around the things I was interested in,” Lily told ICT. “I was a dancer before I was an actor, and I just idolized Maria Tallchief who was America’s first prima ballerina and who’s Osage.
“It’s kind of interesting that full-circle sort of dive into my own interest in education,” she added.
Her father taught her about Osage oil money and culture, prompting her grade-school self to worry about Tallchief and her family’s safety. Tallchief, who became America’s first-ever prima ballerina, lived from 1925-2013. The horrific, systemic Osage massacre took place during the 1920s, giving Lily reason to worry.
“So I know that I must have had an awareness about Osage being killed for their money. But, you know, when you’re a kid, you think about it in terms of being robbed at gunpoint in the night. You don’t think about it as this big systemic entire effort. And, yeah, it was kind of remarkable that that came back around. A lot of the blankets that I wore in the film were from the Tallchief family.”
After introducing herself in Blackfeet at the Golden Globe Awards last month when she made history as the first Native American to win for Best Actress in a Motion Picture-Drama, Gladstone thanked a late language teacher and later, post-awards, a peer back home on the Blackfeet Reservation.
“tsiik̇ǎa˝ṫīyiik̇iitsii´ṗ´ or “I feel the good in what you’ve done,” said Gladstone, practicing her Blackfeet for “gratitude.”
She credits Robert Hall, director of the Blackfeet Language and Literacy program in Browning Public Schools who attended college with her, with revitalizing and preserving language. Her name-dropping has drawn attention to him and the vital work he and his staff do to keep their language alive within the entire community.
“I was shocked,” he said, adding some built-in local humor. “And I ain’t gonna lie, I’m somewhat of a glory hound. You know, I kinda, I like to peacock around here and there and talk about myself, as any Indian man likes to do. When she spoke my name, I was really unaware of what kind of opportunities or stories would come out of it.”
Her sudden mainstream fame, he said, has brought the community together in rather an unforeseen manner.
Her performance art, he said, speaks to language revitalization empowerment, for which he is very thankful.
“We’re all very proud of her here on the rez,” Hall said. “It’s lovely. It’s such a great thing to celebrate. What’s kind of funny, I guess – just to poke fun at ourselves (we’re) like, ‘I don’t know anybody who’s sour about Lily right now.’ She has united the Blackfeet tribe, something that no one has done before.”
As Gladstone recalls stories of teaching drama to kids during a Montana Repertory Theater Educational Tour, she correlates the never-ending adapting and performing teachers do to keep students engaged to an actor’s constant, captive hold on an audience.
Well-grounded and well-versed in teaching youngsters how to act, Gladstone stays true to her culture and serves double-duty as a metaphor for standing strong in one’s culture.
Her riveting grounding exercise comprises a yoga mountain pose, firm stance and meditations on roots tying you to the earth that keep young actors in the moment, stable, solid and focused. She explained:
“Being solidly grounded in a neutral stance where … if somebody were to come by and just kinda lightly push you, you could recover because you’re centered,” she said.
“It’s an incredible place to just always revisit because it’s your body, your instrument, your sovereign form. I have to find myself returning to that often, because you know, as we find in life, there’s a lot of times where people come by and they try and push you off balance.”
However that translates for a student or actor, it’s a matter of connecting.
“But (it’s) staying grounded, staying literally like visually rooted in the earth, staying balanced in your own form and trusting yourself that you will catch yourself.”
Meanwhile, Gladstone remains gracious as she waxes philosophical about her hard-won craft and her indelible ties to her family’s Blackfeet/Niimíipuu roots.
“I think I was so moved that this film shifted the lens and humanized characters that have been peripheral for so long,” she said backstage after she announced a category in Sunday’s informal beach-tent Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, California.
Even as teachers, she added, “are being intimidated out of teaching these histories in their classrooms,” it’s vital that such representational, truthful storytelling continues.
Her star, shining bright over the Blackfeet Reservation, Montana, all of Indian Country and the film-watching world, knows no age or gender boundaries.
“Young, young kids know who she is,” said Hall. “The elders know who she is. She is the most famous Indigenous American right now. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty lovely that somebody you know … makes it to that sphere, but remains who they are.”
Only a few weeks older, Hall jokingly refers to himself as Gladstone’s “elder.”
Now 37 and leaning in as family caregiver, Gladstone and her early education – plus family-charged quest for an acting life – have joyfully conspired in the present moment to honor her with a very good chance at Oscar gold on March 10.
“I’m just so incredibly blessed and humbled and honored,” she said, holding her SAG Award backstage. “This one is a special award. It’s your fellow actors and peers.”
But it’s not all about her, as she subtly reminds fans of a renewed sense of community and solidarity, especially after the unprecedented writers and actors’ strikes last summer that pitted unions against management.
“We’ve survived as a people because of our banding together and our passing our stories forward, collectively creating new ones, collectively continuing on as humans sharing who we are with one another,” said Gladstone.
“Storytelling certainly is not new to this continent. So it’s incredible to hold this articulation of it. My community really does consider this a high calling, so it’s very much a high honor for a lot of reasons.”
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