She was the most talked-about star at the Oscars. What is Lily Gladstone doing now?

This story is part of the June 30 edition of Sunday Life.See all 14 stories.

When I sit down to talk about the new film Fancy Dance with its star, the Oscar-nominated breakout star of Hollywood’s awards season Lily Gladstone, we start a little off-piste with a quote from Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, the 1970s television iteration of the feminist super heroine.

It was that particular Wonder Woman who said: “Women are the wave of the future, and sisterhood is stronger than anything!” Gladstone smiles when I offer her the quote, at both the unexpected inclusion of Wonder Woman as an unlikely guest star in our conversation, but also at the prescience of her observation.

“Sisterhood is the strongest thing,” Gladstone says in reply. “Unfortunately, it’s become almost a subversive thing in Western society when, in worlds like the world I grew up in, and the world of [her new film] Fancy Dance, women lead and own and hold everything together.

“There is a real cultural acceptance and acknowledgment of that in a way that you don’t necessarily see in the Western world. So, it makes sisterhood almost feel like a rebellious act when it’s [actually] just the most natural thing in the world.”

Gladstone is of Siksikaitsitapi and Niimiipuu heritage and grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana, near the Canadian border in central northern United States. In the world in which she was raised, the word aunty is defined as “little mother”, or “other mother”. As a piece of linguistic legerdemain, it sheds a revealing light on the nature and significance of female relationships within the family, and the roles women play in the lives of their younger descendants.

“It makes sisterhood almost feel like a rebellious act when it’s [actually] just the most natural thing in the world.”

LILY GLADSTONE

“There is no divide between your mom and all of her sisters – those are all your moms,” Gladstone says. “Linguistically, culturally, familially, there’s not a separation there. It’s having language that gives you this perspective of your aunties as extensions of your mother and as other mothers for you. It keeps families, it keeps clans, it keeps communities very, very close.”

Though she has been a working actor since her debut in the 2013 French film Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, 2024 finds Gladstone taking her place in the centre of the spotlight. Critically, the 37-year-old actor’s dazzling performance as Mollie Kyle in the Oscar-nominated Killers of the Flower Moon, has two fast follow-ups: the true-crime drama Under the Bridge, based on the book of the same name by Rebecca Godfrey, which will air on Disney+, and Fancy Dance, the feature film debut from director Erica Tremblay, for Apple TV+.

Fancy Dance is the story of Jax, played by Gladstone, a Native American woman who lives on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation Reservation who is also the primary carer of her teenage niece Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson). On a road trip to an upcoming powwow – a gathering of First Nations communities for the purpose of socialising, dancing and singing – Jax hopes to uncover the truth around the disappearance of Roki’s mother.

At first glance, the film is tender and complex, exploring the relationship of the two women in the context of the absence of the third. It has light moments, and great humour, borrowing from the coming-of-age and road trip genres. But it also talks to the missing and murdered Indigenous women in America, and lands on screens at a time when Australia is in the midst of a profound reckoning with the issue of domestic violence.

We begin our conversation – contributions from Wonder Woman aside – by talking about the film itself. Before long, however, we are deep in discussion about the inability of wider society to talk about, or even begin to tackle, the cycles of violence that women of all ethnicities still deal with.

But a discussion with Gladstone is neither polemic in tone nor overtly political. When she discusses the issues, she does so with a voice of quiet strength and an unspoken but certain wisdom inherited from her mother, Betty, who is never far away and occasionally wanders into our conversation from an adjacent room in the house.

Fancy Dance, Gladstone explains to me, intersects powerfully with Killers of the Flower Moon, which explored the first major homicide case investigated by the FBI among oil-rich Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s. “Fancy Dance shows you two different points in history, not just for native people, [with] the same issue a hundred years later,” says Gladstone.

In historical terms, the crunch point was the US Supreme Court ruling on Oliphant v Suquamish Indian Tribe in 1978 which decided (by a 6-2 majority) that Native American tribal courts have no criminal jurisdiction over non-Native Americans.

“We don’t have enough tribal jurisdiction,” Lily says. “The Oliphant case eroded tribal jurisdiction to be able to prosecute non-Native or even Native and non-enrolled offenders of violent crimes on reservation lands. It eroded our sovereignty to take care of ourselves, and that’s where the action is.”

Where there should be national databases, clearer jurisdiction and better processes to both prosecute cases quickly and protect women who become caught in the legal machinery, there is simply a vacuum. “Until we have that, it’s grassroots, it’s having the conversation,” Gladstone says.

The biggest challenge? “That there is still a general perception that we don’t exist any more, that we were conquered and we disappeared into everybody else,” Gladstone says.

“So, forget about even talking about sovereignty, about treaties, about policy, about governance ... we know those are the tools we need to protect our communities. In the meantime, it’s circumvention, it’s sisterhoods, it’s circles like the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre that created a database that the FBI doesn’t have.

Gladstone is of Siksikaitsitapi and Niimiipuu heritage and grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana in central northern United States. Credit: Celeste Sloman/Trunk Archive/Snapper

“It’s a group of Osage women and Native women who are just doing a grassroots job of addressing domestic violence, of going and picking up girls on trafficking tips in the middle of the night, of just doing it,” Gladstone adds. “And in Fancy Dance, you see it’s the sister taking matters into her own hands because it’s her only option.”

There is no question that for Gladstone, the 2024 awards season was a transformational journey. She was the first Native American to be nominated for best actress at the Oscars, the first Indigenous person to win best actress awards at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild.

If her recent life were to be a book, I tell her, we would surely title it Lily’s Amazing, Extraordinary, Ridiculous, Crazy, Insane, Hilarious Award Season. Living through it, Gladstone says, it was “magical, it was ridiculous, it was mysterious, it was all of those things. It changed minute to minute, it was every day, it was every week, it was just so much of everything for so long.

“You spend so long as a native artist getting only certain auditions... and just wondering if you want the place that’s there for you in Hollywood.”

LILY GLADSTONE

“I think what kept me sane in going through it was how excited Indian country was. Just the outpouring of support for all of us, the way the film was received. All of it. You spend so long as a native artist, as a native actor, getting only certain auditions, certain casting calls, and just wondering if you want the place that’s there for you in Hollywood, if you want the representation that’s there for you.”

Before our conversation, I Googled photographs of the Blackfeet Reservation. In lieu of an actual trip to the location, I wanted to get a sense of the landscape Gladstone grew up in. If not the actual detail itself, at least a visual understanding of what her horizons looked like: the colours and textures of the earth and the sky.

A reservation upbringing is challenging, to be sure. Gladstone even had a small role in Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s tender and beautifully crafted Reservation Dogs, about teenagers growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma, which somehow captured the complex balance of hardship, limitation, freedom and joy.

“You don’t get teased the same way anywhere else,” Gladstone says, laughing, when I ask her to talk to me specifically about the upside of a reservation childhood. “I don’t want to say you get torn apart, but people just see you in your essence so quickly. Nicknames happen so effortlessly and it’s a beautiful way of learning to have humour about your own ego and not take yourself so seriously.”

“I just remember you sitting around the table with elders and listening to their stories and the characters,” her mum Betty says, stepping momentarily into the interview.

“My mum’s trying to get in on my interview,” Gladstone says, laughing.

It takes a moment, but Betty soon departs, and we reset. “I grew up there [on the reservation] and I left there,” Gladstone says. “But I still have connection and it’s hard because when you go back, you learn about a lot of the hardships. The whole shadow over the first season of Reservation Dogs, for example, is the suicide of a friend.

“You just feel like communities are almost constantly dealing with that heartbreak, that very specific heartbreak. And the strength that builds around it, the kind of humour you need to have to work through it and move through it, the charge and urgency to take care of your community, because you have to. Nobody else is doing it for you.”

Fancy Dance is streaming on Apple TV+.

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