Watch Lily Gladstone's Historic Golden Globes Speech

Lily Gladstone Gives Powerful Speech for Her History-Making Golden Globes Win

By Pinar Noorata on January 8, 2024

All the stars of television and film were gathered for one glamorous night at the 2024 Golden Globes. After a long hiatus with the overlapping WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that took place in 2023, Hollywood was finally back to award the best talents as deemed by Golden Globes journalists. While Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Bear, Poor Things, and Anatomy of a Fall seemed to be the biggest and most-talked-about winners of the night, there was one winner’s speech that was a clear highlight. Lily Gladstone’s historic win for the role of Mollie Burkhart in Killers of the Flower Moon makes her the first Indigenous person to be awarded Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, and her winning speech is as powerful as her presence.

Within the Golden Globe’s 81-year history, there has been no other Indigenous person to be awarded a Golden Globe for acting. This is something that Gladstone has been fully aware of and, in her speech, she makes a point to mention her win as a historic one. She begins by speaking in Blackfeet, which in and of itself is a powerful moment. Speaking in the Native language is a impactful choice to represent an underrepresented community.

Despite the time limits on acceptance speeches, Gladstone manages to not only thank her co-stars in the film (Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro), the director (Martin Scorsese), and others in the industry, but she also shares a clear history on Hollywood’s sordid past and a message of hope for Indigenous youths. “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 shares. “This is for every little rez 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 from and with each other.”

Gladstone’s historic win seems to only be the beginning of her journey. There has been a lot of Oscar buzz for the actor since the premiere of the film. If she nabs a nomination and subsequently wins the award, she’d make history yet again as the first Indigenous Native American to win an Academy Award for acting. Funny enough, Gladstone was actually voted “Most Likely To Win An Oscar” when she was in high school, so this would fulfill that prophecy as well.

Scroll down to watch Gladstone’s full winner’s speech.