Lily Gladstone hailed her Golden Globes success "a historic" win.
Lily Gladstone's historic win
The 37-year-old actress opened her acceptance speech for Best Actress (Drama) in Blackfeet language as she became the first Indigenous woman to win the award and she insisted her prize for 'Killers of the Flower Moon' didn't "just belong" to her because of the struggles of the people before her.
Speaking on stage at Los Angeles' Beverly Hilton Hotel on Sunday (07.01.24), she said: "I love everyone in this room right now, thank you. I don't have words. I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language, the beautiful community, nation, that raised me, that encouraged me to keep doing this.
"I'm here with my mom who even though she is not Blackfeet worked tirelessly to get our language into our classroom so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up.
"This award belongs to - I hope I don't get counted down too fast because this is an historic one - I'm so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language up here because in this business Native actors used to speak their lines in English then the sound mixers used to run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera.
"This is an historic win, it doesn't belong to just me, I'm holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film at the table over here and my mother, standing on all of your shoulders."
Lily went on to pay tribute to director Martin Scorsese and co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro.
She said: "Thank you Marty, thank you Leo, thank you Bob, you are all changing things. Thank you for being such allies."
And the actress - who took the award ahead of Annette Bening (‘Nyad’), Sandra Hüller (‘Anatomy of a Fall’), Greta Lee (‘Past Lives’), Carey Mulligan ('Maestro’), and Cailee Spaeny (‘Priscilla’) - dedicated her win to "every little Native kid" out there.
She said: "This is for every little rez kid come every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream and is seeing themselves represented in our stories told by ourselves, in our own words, with tremendous allies and tremendous trust from within, from each other.”
Tagged in Martin Scorsese