Lily Gladstone says using she/they pronouns helps to “decolonise gender” and connect to indigenous heritage
The Killers of the Flower Moon actor Lily Gladstone recently discussed using she/they pronouns, explaining that her indigenous heritage taught them to consider different pronouns at an early age.
Gladstone, who has Blackfeet and Nez Perce ancestry, shared how she was exposed to misgendering as a child when others would mistake their boy cousins for young girls because they wore their hair long.
“I remember being nine years old and just being a little disheartened, seeing how often a lot of my boy cousins were misgendered because they wore their hair long,” Gladstone told People. “It happens to a lot of kids, I think, especially Native boys … getting teased for it,” adding, “So I remember back then being like, everybody should just be ‘they’.”
Gladstone also explained how in most indigenous languages, gendered pronouns don’t exist and that it’s often reflected in a person’s name. Their grandfather, she explains, was given a name that translated to ‘Iron Woman’, despite his gender.
“It doesn’t happen as much anymore, but there’ve been several times in my life where I’ve been speaking to a northern Cheyenne-first language speaker [or another] Indigenous-first language speaker where they’ll accidentally misgender you when they’re talking to you,” says Gladstone. “And then they’ll get embarrassed about it, but it’s because they’ve learned English later.”
She added: “So Blackfeet, we don’t have gendered pronouns, but our gender is implied in our name. But even that’s not binary,” says Gladstone, adding that her grandfather’s Blackfeet name meant “Iron Woman.”
Concluding: “So, yeah, my pronoun use is partly a way of decolonising gender for myself.”
In Martin Scorsese’s Western crime drama, Lily Gladstone stars as Mollie Burkhart, the wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Buckhart. The movie explores the Oklahoma murders, which took place in the 1920s, with Mollie and Ernest’s relationship becoming the story’s focal point.
Check out the trailer below.
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