Lily Gladstone made history at the 2024 Golden Globes ceremony when she became the first Indigenous person to win the award for best actress in a motion picture drama.
The 37-year-old actor began her acceptance speech for her role as Mollie Burkhart in "Killers of the Flower Moon" by speaking in Blackfeet language.
Dr. Karla Bird, tribal outreach specialist at the University of Montana, translated the beginning of Gladstone’s speech for TODAY.com.
"Hello all my relations," Gladstone said, according to Bird. "My name is Eagle Woman. I am Blackfeet. I love you!"
Dr. Heather Bliss, lecturer in the department of linguistics at Simon Fraser University, told TODAY.com a slightly different translation: "Hello my friends/relatives. My name is Piitaaki (Eagle Woman). I am Blackfoot. I love you all."
After the ceremony, Gladstone told reporters the beginning of her speech was "often how I introduce myself in a new group of people, especially when it's significant." The actor spent her early childhood on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.
"One of the first things we're taught is you say your name, you say where you're from and you say hello to everyone — hello, my friends," Gladstone said. "So it was one of the more natural things I could do in the moment."
Bliss, a linguist who has been working with Blackfeet speakers for about 20 years, told TODAY.com the beginning of Gladstone's speech was a "standard greeting and a customary way to show respect in the language," and that it was very exciting to see it used in a broad space like the Golden Globes stage.
"Gladstone's greeting at the Golden Globes is just a standard greeting ... but it's something that generates a lot of excitement for people," Bliss said. "You can imagine Blackfeet youth seeing that and thinking, 'Wow, there's a space for my language and my culture.' And it's very mainstream environment."
"And it's about expanding the domains, right? We don't want languages to just be learned in a classroom, and living in a classroom," Bliss continued. "We want languages to be living out in the world, and this is a really great example of that."
During Gladstone's speech, the "Killers of the Flower Moon" star told the audience why she decided to speak Blackfeet language.
"I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language, the beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this," she said. "I'm here with 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."
Gladstone continued, noting the nature of the historic moment as she held her award.
"I'm so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I'm not fluent in, up 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," she said.
"This is a historic win — it doesn't belong to just me. I'm holding it right now — holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film at this table over here, and my mother, Tantoo Cardinal, standing on all of your shoulders," she said.
Gladstone went on to thank the film's director, Martin Scorsese, and her co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, along with Chief Standing Bear, a 19th century Native American civil rights leader, and the Osage Nation.
"Thank you to all of you, and this is for every little res kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there 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," she said from the stage.
Talking to reporters after her speech, Gladstone added her friend and language revitalization teacher Robert Hall recently taught her a "beautiful" word that she wasn't familiar with, but the word didn't make it into her speech.
"I was trying to remember that one and nerves kicked it out of my head," she said.
Gladstone's win comes days before "Killers of the Flower Moon" is set to begin streaming on Apple TV on Jan. 12.
