Get To Know Lily Gladstone’s Parents

If Lily Gladstone wins a Best Actress Oscar for her outstanding performance in Flowers Of The Killer Moon on Sunday, she will make history as the first Native American woman to win the prestigious award. Indeed, she already made history as the first Native American to receive a nomination for Best Actress and has already won the Screen Actors Guild award and the Golden Globe for Best Actress, another historic win. She has been making her community proud throughout awards season, honoring her heritage as her parents have long encouraged her to do. In fact, both her parents are strong advocates for Native American communities themselves. Here’s what else you need to know.

She was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana.

Gladstone’s parents, Betty and Howard, raised their daughter on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana from the time she was born in 1986. The actress is of Siksikaitsitapi and Niimiipuu heritage, with her father being of Piegan Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage and her mother Betty of European descent. Gladstone has been paying tribute to that heritage throughout awards season by wearing clothing and jewelry by indigenous designers and delivering her acceptance speeches first in Blackfeet, an Algonquian language spoken by the Blackfoot or Niitsitapi people, before transitioning to English. A language Gladstone credits her mom Betty with teaching her.

Her father studied at the University of Washington.

Gladstone’s dad Howard studied at the University of Washington in the ‘70s, but sadly left early because, as the actress told The Guardian, “it was not an easy time for an outspoken Native American.” He eventually went into broadcast journalism.

Her mother works in early childhood education.

Betty Peace-Gladstone has a degree in child development, and spoke to NPR with her daughter by her side about moving to “the reservation as a single woman to work with the Head Start program as their education coordinator.”

There she looked at the way culture and language define the outcome of how a person looks at the world. “When I moved to the reservation, I saw it in action. Just having the experience of children be reflective of who the community is. And that became even closer to my heart once I became a mother.”

Betty was the one who encouraged her daughter to learn Blackfeet.

Gladstone credited her mother with giving her the tools to learn how to speak Blackfeet, saying in her Golden Globes speech that she “worked tirelessly to get our language into our classroom so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up.”

It was a proud moment for her mother. “She became a really good self-advocate,” Peace-Gladstone told NPR. “She, I think, felt very empowered to address some misperceptions about Natives, to share more about who she was with her peers, even in high school, to even be granted the opportunity to create kind of a parallel exploration in curriculum in some of her classes. That she could say, you know, I'd really like to look at this from a Native perspective or Blackfeet perspective. So I think because she grew up in that kind of bicultural, somewhat bilingual environment, she just felt that was the way education should be.”

Both of her parents are descendants of historical figures.

Both of Gladstone’s parents have historical figures in their heritage. Her father Howard is descended from Red Crow, a Kainai Nation chief, while her mother Betty is a a distant relative to British Prime Minister William Gladstone. She told The Telegraph that her first visit to London gave her some interesting perspective on her family history. “Of course, it was the Brits that colonized my fam­ily, too. In one swoop, I swung by Westminster Abbey, where William Ewart lies, and then up the road to where, unbeknownst to me, my great-great-great-grandfather’s war shirt is in the British Museum,” she shared at the time. “Red Crow was chief of the Blood Nation. When King Charles came to Canada [in 1977], when he was still Prince Charles, the nation gave him my grandpa’s name.”

She found out about her Oscar nomination through her parents’ FaceTime.

Gladstone told The Hollywood Reporter that she learned about her Oscar nomination through a FaceTime with her parents. “My mom had the camera flipped around, and she was filming the TV,” Gladstone told the outlet. “And I told her, ‘No mom, I don’t want to learn from, like, watching it through your phone. I wanna learn on your and dad’s faces.’ Sure enough, I could barely hear my name through the phone, but their reaction told me that it was a nod.”

A full circle moment for the Gladstone family.