There is no question that for Gladstone, the 2024 awards season was a transformational journey. She was the first Native American to be nominated for best actress at the Oscars, the first Indigenous person to win best actress awards at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild. If her recent life were to be a book, I tell her, we would surely title it Lily’s Amazing, Extraordinary, Ridiculous, Crazy, Insane, Hilarious Award Season. Living through it, Gladstone says, it was “magical, it was ridiculous, it was mysterious, it was all of those things. It changed minute to minute, it was every day, it was every week, it was just so much of everything for so long.
“You spend so long as a native artist getting only certain auditions… and just wondering if you want the place that’s there for you in Hollywood.” – LILY GLADSTONE
“I think what kept me sane in going through it was how excited Indian country was. Just the outpouring of support for all of us, the way the film was received. All of it. You spend so long as a native artist, as a native actor, getting only certain auditions, certain casting calls, and just wondering if you want the place that’s there for you in Hollywood, if you want the representation that’s there for you.”
Before our conversation, I Googled photographs of the Blackfeet Reservation. In lieu of an actual trip to the location, I wanted to get a sense of the landscape Gladstone grew up in. If not the actual detail itself, at least a visual understanding of what her horizons looked like: the colours and textures of the earth and the sky. A reservation upbringing is challenging, to be sure. Gladstone even had a small role in Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s tender and beautifully crafted Reservation Dogs, about teenagers growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma, which somehow captured the complex balance of hardship, limitation, freedom and joy.
“You don’t get teased the same way anywhere else,” Gladstone says, laughing, when I ask her to talk to me specifically about the upside of a reservation childhood. “I don’t want to say you get torn apart, but people just see you in your essence so quickly. Nicknames happen so effortlessly and it’s a beautiful way of learning to have humour about your own ego and not take yourself so seriously.”
