Lily Gladstone Has Already Won

By Anne Keala Kelly, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

Congratulations to Lily Gladstone for winning both the SAG and the Golden Globe Lead Actress award for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon. This film is a window into the exploitation of Native American people. She is the first Native American to win a SAG or a Golden Globe award for lead actress. Hats off to her and the path she is forging for other indigenous actors.
– Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RFK Jr.’s congratulatory message, on X, to Lily Gladstone after she won back-to-back Lead Actress awards from the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon, highlighted two history-making aspects of this moment. 

Gladstone is the first Native American woman to ascend to this level of critical acclaim in the film industry. On March 10, as one of five women in the Lead Actress category for an Academy Award, she may become a member of a club sometimes referred to as “a triple threat” if she takes home the Oscar. But just by landing in that rarest league of Academy Award nominees, Gladstone has already broken through a wall that was constructed at the beginning of Hollywood, an industry that made its foundational money in its formative years with “Cowboys and Indians” movies. Until recent decades those Indians weren’t even played by Native actors.

The theft, erasure, and marginalization of Indigenous peoples in American history has been a long-standing practice among those who make the laws, run the government, and wield the narrative power, be that with ink, celluloid, or digital tech. One could say that Native voices, stories, and histories were the first to be censored in the US. 

But Kennedy’s message also put the movie itself into historical perspective with 12 simple words. “This film is a window into the exploitation of Native American people,” and he has long stood with Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups.

Killers of the Flower Moon puts the gruesome murders and theft of Osage families and their wealth, by white oil profiteers during the 1920s, front and center for all to witness. Until now, it was a little-known fact that, like the film industry, the foundational wealth of the oil titans was established by manipulating and stealing from Natives. Scorsese’s depiction of Oklahoma a century ago links the reality of Native Americans struggling to survive today with brutal truths about our past that most Americans have yet to reckon with. Even now, it’s an uphill climb just to get sports fans to comprehend how insulting and demeaning it is to make mascots of peoples whose lives have been immiserated for generations.

The acknowledgments of both Gladstone’s intensely understated, heartbreaking performance and the role Big Oil has played in damaging more than just the environment are politically timely. In this election year, everywhere you turn the subject of justice and whether the nation will survive as a democracy or stumble and fumble its way into authoritarianism is central to the conversation. A national sense of electoral crisis is palpable, fueled by a relentless top-down demand by the duopoly that we adhere to their predetermined outcome of Joe Biden or Donald Trump. And if you, the voter, do not agree to this narrow version of leadership, you are deemed part of the problem. 

The inconvenience of people voting for whomever they choose, which is the cornerstone of a democracy, will not be tolerated. In that milieu, Kennedy is, unsurprisingly, the fly in the ointment. Like those Michiganders who chose “Uncommitted” over Joe Biden in their primary, he is a threat.

However, his decision to join the race and then declare as an independent isn’t the only thing that makes Kennedy a threat. More than any other candidate running for the office of President of the United States – and probably more than anyone who has held that office – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. understands the centuries-long struggle of Native Americans. For decades, Kennedy has taken up legal battles for the environment that have overlapped with Indigenous rights, and he has stood with them in protest, including at Standing Rock in 2016 against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2013 he was arrested at a protest in front of the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline, which was slated to cross through the Rosebud Sioux reservation.

Yet all those years of hard work are now mocked, as if fighting against harmful chemical giants, cleaning up our rivers, and standing up for Native peoples’ rights have nothing to do with his campaign for the presidency. His work is intentionally mischaracterized and demonized in the corporate media in an effort to elide the impact of his prodigious contributions to legal protections for precious waterways that many people take for granted. Those include the Hudson River and what became an internationally renowned agreement for the protection of New York City’s watershed, to name just two.

Not one of the other major candidates can hold a candle to what he has accomplished for the environment, and none of them has a platform that addresses the subject of Native sovereignty. Unlike all of them, Kennedy’s campaign policy regarding Native Americans clarifies his intentions going forward. His campaign’s website, like his message to Lily Gladstone, puts it succinctly:

• The federal government’s unfair dealings and broken treaties with the tribal nations are our nation’s original sin.

• The spirit as well as the letter of treaties must be honored.

• Religious practices and sacred sites will be defended.

• Tribal sovereignty and the right to self-determination will be respected.

• The need for restoration of illegally taken lands and resources, compensation for broken treaties, protection and enhancement of natural resources in Indian Country, will be elevated to matters of national interest.

At the end of his tweet about Gladstone, Kennedy writes, “Hats off to her and the path she is forging for other indigenous actors.” He’s right. Gladstone’s success is a breakthrough in a media landscape still persistently closed off to marginalized groups. But it can also translate to real-world changes of the types Kennedy understands so well. 

Here’s hoping the academy votes for Lily Gladstone, whose appearance at the Oscars will alone be a moment that millions of Indigenous people, in and beyond the US and US-controlled territories, will be celebrating. To us, though, she has already won.

Keala is an independent filmmaker, journalist, podcaster and media strategist focusing on politics, the environment and Indigenous peoples’ rights and cultural survival.