Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon. (Courtesy Apple TV+)
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My father-in-law and late husband, both accomplished actors, wished for a time when Hollywood would make movies about real Native Americans. Now my daughter is living it.
It’s 1985, and I am 24—a few years removed from smoking cigarettes in front of the Baskin-Robbins in Brooklyn Heights.
I’m in Georgetown, South Carolina, and I jump off the back of the production van and directly into the path of two men wearing Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots. I recognize the older one, his silver hair braided with red ribbon, as the actor Will Sampson, who played Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He is with his son Tim, with whom I will fall in love.
Now it’s early 1987, and Will is very sick. He is mostly confined to a big carved-wood bed in his cabin in Sunland-Tujunga, east of Los Angeles, nestled against the mountains.
We watch what Will wants to watch: the documentary Images of Indians; an interview with Will, in which Tim Giago, who founded the first Native American–run newspaper in the country, asks Will about Indians in Hollywood; and, of course, Cuckoo’s Nest, with Will narrating. He tells us that Jack Nicholson strained so hard during the shock treatment scene, he pulled a muscle.
Tim and I are at Will’s side when he dies in June of that year.
He doesn’t live to see the dream, what he pushed for, what other Native actors will spend the next three and a half decades pushing for: to have their stories told, to tell their own stories, to be portrayed not as caricatures but as fully human. The dream has been building and building, and finally, yesterday, something happened: Killers of the Flower Moon came out. It was directed by Martin Scorsese, and it does what no Hollywood blockbuster has ever done.
This granddaughter—my daughter—is conceived in January 1989, several months after Tim shoots War Party on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana. We spend three months on the rez. Everyone knows one another and we meet many locals, including the Gladstone family, at a potluck dinner. Among the kids running around is the Gladstones’ two-year-old daughter Lily.
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