When addressing Native American inclusion, Lily Gladstone urged viewers to “look at one of the teams that’s playing” in the Super Bowl. Gladstone discussed her experience as the first Native American performer shortlisted for the Best Actress Academy Award in an interview with journalist Dave Karger at the Virtuosos Awards of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, wherein she was selected as a laureate. On Saturday, the actor of Killers of the Flower Moon, who is of Siksikaitsitapi and Niimiipuu descent, described the entire accomplishment as “long overdue” and mentioned that “some of the first filmmakers [and] the first film footage was shot by native people documenting our way of life.”
“But that’s a lot of history and a lot of years of exclusion or misrepresentation, and I mean Super Bowl’s tomorrow,” she stated. “We haven’t come that far if we look at one of the teams that’s playing.” On the evening of Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs square off in the Super Bowl. Gladstone was probably talking about the subsequent, which has been controversial due to the designation and arrowhead emblem.
Following the Chiefs’ 2023 Super Bowl victory, protesters staged around the arena in Arizona that was hosting the NFL game, calling on the league to “stop the chop” and “change the name” of the franchise, according to The Guardian. At their home stadium in Kansas City, the Chiefs had previously prohibited supporters from donning false headpieces and specific kinds of facial makeup “that references or appropriates American Indian cultures and traditions” in 2020, according to an NPR story at the time. The NFL’s Washington club, which was formerly known as after a phrase that has been used as a racist slur against Native Americans, completely changed its name a few months before this decision. Since then, the group has adopted the name Commanders.
Gladstone also mentioned that her Oscar candidature is “a lot to put on one person, but I don’t look at it as mine” in her conversation with Karger. “It’s circumstantial that it’s this filmmaker, that it’s this point in history, that it’s this story, that it’s this kind of an epic tale, that it’s this character that it’s this community,” Gladstone, who prefers pronouns such as she/they. “I mean, the film is so remarkable because of how remarkable Osage people are and how much they had to say about the making of it, how embraced we all were.”
“That’s ultimately what means the most to me is, I mean, the way that the response in Indian country from the Globes win, it’s like, I’m done. It’s very shared,” she continued. “It’s very touching to see the impact that a win for one of us means for all of us.”