All Eyes on Lily Gladstone

The actress is the unflinching face of an American tragedy in Martin Scorsese's historical epic.

- By Alison Willmore. Photograph by Hugo Yu

Before she was cast as the anguished center of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, before she played a grief-stricken mother on Reservation Dogs, and before her breakout role in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, Lily Gladstone taught school children about Native American history. She taught while in character as part of an educational theater program—the kind of steady work you’d feel lucky to get as a young actor (which Gladstone was at the time), even if it wasn’t what you dreamed of doing as an acting student (which she had been at the University of Montana not long before)—touring alone to school auditoriums, trading lines with a prerecorded track about having to shed her culture while a multimedia presentation was projected behind her. She played Alice, a Navajo girl who endured an abusive, assimilationist education in order to become a nurse. The part didn't reflect Gladstone's background—her father is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, her mother white, and her childhood was split between Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation and Seattle—but it wasn’t entirely distant, either. Her grandmother had attended one of those infamous boarding schools, Chemawa, from which hundreds of children never returned; they are buried there in marked and unmarked graves.

It was rewarding for Gladstone to expose young audiences to facts that weren’t included in their textbooks, even if she had to supplement the job with weekly shifts at Staples for health insurance. But serving as an envoy for the injustices and suppressed stories of a whole people was exhausting. “It makes you tough,” she told me in New York in June before the start of the sag strike. By her last performance, a month after she had finished filming