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    Jesse Ed Davis Was Rock Heroes’ Secret Weapon. And a Mystery.

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    The Native American guitarist graced records by Bob Dylan and John Lennon, but fell to addiction in 1988. A new book and exhibit are telling his story.In the spring of 1967, the blues singer Taj Mahal was about to cut his first solo album for Columbia Records and needed to find a new guitarist in a hurry. He headed to a bar in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon, tipped off about a young Native American musician with a mesmerizing touch on the Telecaster. Having already worked with the guitar prodigy Ry Cooder in the short-lived band the Rising Sons, Mahal’s standards were high. But it took barely a minute of hearing Jesse Ed Davis to realize he’d found what he was looking for.“This guy was speaking through his instrument,” Mahal recalled. “In those days everyone wanted to play the blues, but they’d overplay their licks at high volume, trying to get up into the stratosphere. They didn’t have the natural feeling he did — Jesse legitimately had the blues and played it his own way.”Revered by fellow musicians, Davis has remained a cult figure, despite an extraordinary résumé: He played on some of Bob Dylan’s most enduring records, worked closely with multiple Beatles, anchored the band at the Concert for Bangladesh and shaped classic albums by Rod Stewart, Harry Nilsson and Neil Diamond, among others. A complex character who didn’t fit Native American stereotypes or the typical notions of a rock ’n’ roller, in the decades since his 1988 death at 43, he’s remained something of an enigma.The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., is hosting a multimedia exhibition, “Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem.”Zac FowlerThat should change with the publication of the biography “Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis,” by Douglas K. Miller. In conjunction with the book, the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., is hosting a multimedia exhibition, “Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem.” In February, some of Davis’s friends — including Mahal and Jackson Browne — will play a tribute concert at Tulsa’s Performing Arts Center.“Jesse was a phenomenon,” said Browne, whose 1972 track “Doctor My Eyes” was transformed by Davis’s spontaneous one-take solo into a timeless pop hit. “He responded to music in such an immediate way. You always wondered how he became that kind of artist.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Overlooked No More: Go-won-go Mohawk, Trailblazing Indigenous Actress

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      In the 1880s, the only roles for Indigenous performers were laden with negative stereotypes. So Mohawk decided to write her own narratives.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For a long time, theatrical roles for Indigenous characters were laden with stereotypes: the savage, the tragic martyr, the helpless drunk. And it was rare in stories of any kind, on the page or on the stage, for an Indigenous character to have a starring role.By the late 1880s, the actress Go-won-go Mohawk had had enough. “I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles,” like meek princesses or submissive women who were restrained in corsets, she told The Des Moines Register and Leader in 1910. So she decided to write her own roles, ultimately carving out a groundbreaking career in which she told stories onstage about Indigenous people as the heroes of their own lives. She also did it while performing as a man.Mohawk’s primary work was “Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier” (1892), which follows the title character, a young Indigenous man, as he saves a young white woman from a stampede, winning her heart and earning the respect of her family.The woman’s father, a colonel, offers Wep-ton-no-mah a position as a mail carrier, which he initially turns down. “I could not start being under the control of anyone but the great Manitou,” Wep-ton-no-mah says, referring to the spiritual power of the Algonquians. “I want to be free–free–free like the birds, the eagles and deers — owning no master but one.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      The Musician Building the Great Native American Songbook

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      The musician Tim Long was sitting at his dining room table on a September morning, looking at old family photos and talking about how good can sometimes emerge from suffering.Long’s mother, Stella, a member of the Choctaw Nation, grew up destitute in rural eastern Oklahoma. When she was young, her widowed mother remarried and moved nearby, leaving Stella and her four brothers to fend largely for themselves. The Oklahoma government put the children in boarding school, where Stella caught tuberculosis. One of her lungs had to be removed, and she endured two stints in quarantine that lasted a total of five years.One thing that gave her solace was her discovery of a classical music station on the radio. She developed a special fondness for Beethoven.“Without that, I wouldn’t be in music,” Long, 56, said over cups of oolong tea. “My life would not have happened if she — if my parents — had not had that broader outlook.”Long’s family in Yeager, Okla., before he was born. His father, Fred Long, is in back; his mother, Stella Long, is on the left, with relatives.via Timothy LongLong’s wide-ranging life in music has included playing the violin and piano, conducting, coaching singers and teaching. And now, he has taken on a new role, perhaps the most significant yet: commissioning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      How ‘Yellowstone’ Captured America

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      When the television series “Yellowstone” began in 2018, it was with a chip on its shoulder. HBO had passed on the show, pitched by its writer-director-executive producer Taylor Sheridan as “The Godfather” on horseback, for not quite fitting its prestige-oriented lineup. It was picked up instead by the fledgling network Paramount, which greenlit 10 episodes, to be broadcast on a rebranded version of Spike TV.Since that relatively low-profile debut, “Yellowstone,” now in its fifth season, has gone from cable underdog to becoming one of the most-watched scripted shows on TV, one that has spawned prequels and spinoffs, a cottage industry of merch and a bit of internal drama among its cast members and producers. Most notably, its best-known actor, Kevin Costner, will not return as John Dutton, Yellowstone’s taciturn patriarch, for the show’s final episodes when they begin airing on Nov. 10.The neo-Western wrapped contemporary ideas of rugged individualism inside the soapy drama of a land-hoarding family’s succession planning. As “Yellowstone” prepares to finally reveal whether one of John Dutton’s kids — Beth (Kelly Reilly) or Kayce (Luke Grimes) or Jamie (Wes Bentley) — can take over the family business, we look back at how the series became both a chronicle of America’s culture wars and appointment viewing across the United States.Filling a Red State VoidFor millions of Americans, “Yellowstone” tapped into a deep unease they have about their changing communities.Emerson Miller/Paramount NetworkSometime in summer 2018, my phone rang in Los Angeles. It was my brother calling from Montana, where we both grew up and he still lives. He wanted to talk about a new Western television show called “Yellowstone.”For the first time ever, he said, Hollywood had gotten something right. Everyone in Montana was abuzz about it — his fishing buddies, the local radio hosts, the waitress at Pay’s Cafe down by the livestock auction yards in Billings. What did I think?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Amid Orchestral Waves, the Sound of Cultures Conversing

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      “Natural History,” performed in Cincinnati, is a collaboration between the composer Michael Gordon and the Native American ensemble Steiger Butte Drum.Eleven members of Steiger Butte Drum sat in a circle around a large elk-hide drum at the front of the stage of Cincinnati’s Music Hall last Thursday. Washes of sound from the orchestra behind them built and receded in grand waves.The group was the concerto soloist, of a kind, in “Natural History” by Michael Gordon, one of the Bang on a Can composers who infused Minimalism with rough, rebellious energy in the 1980s. A few times over the course of the 25-minute piece, Steiger Butte Drum, a traditional percussion and vocal ensemble of the Klamath Tribes of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, broke out in a ceremonial song, the members beating the drum in fast, dramatic unison as they made a piercing, tangily pitch-bending, wordlessly wailing chant.They were joined by a full chorus, placed in the first balcony: the men on one side of the hall, the women on the other. Percussion in the upper balcony evoked woodland animals; brasses, also up there, let out joyful, squealing bits of fanfare that seemed to tumble down and join lines coming from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra onstage — eventually rising to a powerful, churning finale, with all these sprawling forces, conducted by Teddy Abrams, going at once.Unsettled and unsettling, both celebratory and threatening, imposing and ultimately harmonious, this was the sound of a cultural conversation that is still, after centuries, in its nascent stages.Native American composers and performers are slowly gaining more visibility after having long been largely ignored by institutions associated with the Western classical tradition. Raven Chacon, a Diné composer and visual artist, won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2022. In March, the New York Philharmonic premiered an orchestral version of the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s “Pisachi.”And yet Native music, kaleidoscopically varied across the country and its many tribes and heritages, remains only rarely heard, and so only vaguely understood and appreciated, by non-Natives. This is hardly surprising, given the country’s more general neglect of a full, sustained reckoning with its history with — and its often stunningly cruel treatment of — Native Americans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Cole Brings Plenty, ’1923’ Actor, Is Found Dead

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      Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, was found dead in Kansas days after his family reported him missing. Officials did not provide a cause of death.Cole Brings Plenty, an actor in the television series “1923,” was found dead on Friday in Kansas after his family reported him missing earlier in the week, officials said.The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that its deputies had found Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, in a wooded area in Johnson County, which borders Missouri.The deputies had been responding to a report of an unoccupied vehicle and found him dead in an area away from it, the statement said. The office did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Brings Plenty, who identified himself as Mnicoujou Lakota on Instagram, played Pete Plenty Clouds, a Native American sheepherder, in the television show “1923,” a prequel to “Yellowstone.” The show depicts abuse toward Native American children in boarding schools established or supported by the government.In May 2023, Mr. Brings Plenty and his uncle Mo Brings Plenty visited the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in Washington to talk about the boarding schools and other issues affecting Native Americans.Mr. Brings Plenty’s acting credits also include the Western television shows “Into the Wild Frontier” and “The Tall Tales of Jim Bridger,” according to IMDb, the entertainment database. He was a student at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan.Mr. Brings Plenty’s father, Joe Brings Plenty Sr., confirmed his son’s death in a statement shared by a family spokeswoman, Michelle Shining Elk.“We would also like to thank everyone who came to walk beside us as we searched for my son and provided the resources we needed to expand our search areas,” Mr. Brings Plenty Sr. said in the statement.Mo Brings Plenty shared a missing person’s poster on social media that said his nephew went missing on March 31 and had missed an appointment with his agent, which was “uncharacteristic.”The poster said that Mr. Brings Plenty had last been seen in Lawrence, Kan.The Lawrence Police Department said in a statement that it had submitted an affidavit for the arrest of Mr. Brings Plenty after the police identified him as a suspect in a case of domestic violence that happened on the morning of March 31.The police said that officers had responded to a woman screaming for help in an apartment in Lawrence and that the suspect had fled before officers arrived.“This incident involves allegations of domestic violence, which limits the amount of information we can share to protect the victim,” the statement said.The police said that Mr. Brings Plenty’s family had contacted them, expressed concern and reported him as a missing person. Mr. Brings Plenty was found about 28 miles southeast of Lawrence. More

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      in Television

      With ‘Echo,’ Alaqua Cox Smashes Boundaries, and Bad Guys’ Faces

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      The actress almost didn’t audition for the Marvel superhero role that now has her playing the lead of a new Disney+ series. Thank goodness for peer pressure.“I thought in the back of my head, There’s no way I’m going to get this.”Alaqua Cox was in her home office in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin, recalling the moment in early 2020 when some friends forwarded her an online link to a casting call for a deaf Indigenous woman in her 20s. At the time, Cox, now 26, had been hopping from job to job — at a nursing home, at Amazon and FedEx warehouses — and had never acted outside a couple of plays in high school.She could scarcely envision clinching any regular TV gig, let alone the role of a Marvel superhero: Maya Lopez, better known as Echo, a Marvel comic book character. But Cox did get it, and soon she found herself flipping and punching her way through the 2021 Disney+ series “Hawkeye” alongside the stars Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld.Now, just over two years after her professional acting debut, Cox is taking the lead in the five-episode spinoff miniseries, “Echo,” which premiered Tuesday night on Disney+ and Hulu. Picking up where “Hawkeye” left off, “Echo” sees Maya transform herself into a motorcycle-revving, roundhouse-kicking, one-woman army hellbent on vengeance against her former mentor, the criminal boss known as Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), for his role in her father’s murder.Cox, an Indigenous woman who is deaf, played a Marvel superhero with similar attributes in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye,” her first professional acting gig.Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel StudiosGrowing up on the Menominee Tribe reservation in Keshena, Wis., Cox, who was born deaf, couldn’t fathom the idea of seeing someone like herself onscreen. She was used to seeing deaf roles being portrayed by hearing characters — “which was such B.S.!” she said in a video call last month, aided by an American Sign Language interpreter, Ashley Change. She rarely saw Indigenous roles onscreen at all.She wasn’t particularly attuned to the superhero genre. Long before sharing scenes with a full-fledged Avenger, Cox mainly consumed Marvel movies passively, as a means of bonding with her Marvel fanatic father, William.“I remember watching with him, sitting on the couch, chilling on my phone,” she said. “My dad would be like: ‘No, no, look! Something cool is about to happen!’”It was peer pressure that ultimately got Cox to submit her audition video. She recalled lying on a raft on the lake at her parents’ house when yet another friend contacted her, forwarding a screenshot of the casting call.“I knew it was a sign for me to give it a shot,” she said. “I went: ‘Oh, fine! Let’s just try it out.’”Cox’s self-recorded video was one of hundreds that by June 2020 had landed on the desk of Sarah Finn, who has been the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s main casting director going back to the 2008 film “Iron Man.” In search of the perfect fit, she had contacted Native American and deaf schools, organizations and cultural centers across the country. Cox’s tape piqued her interest.“She has this beautiful, open, smiling face, and then she showed us her reading, which made it almost impossible to believe it was the same person,” Finn said. “She was able to switch on a dime and channel this other much more powerful and intense character.”“I know he’s looking down on me from heaven, and he’s just cheering me on,” Cox said of her father, who died on the same week that Maya’s father’s death was portrayed in “Echo.” Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesOnce Finn had narrowed down her selection to Cox and a few others, she got the studio to assign Cox an acting coach, personal trainer and A.S.L. consultant, all of whom were deaf, to help her prepare for her “Hawkeye” screen test. (“It was just so nice to be able to have those one-on-one encounters with people,” Cox said, “and everything went so smoothly.”)The investment paid off; “Hawkeye” had found its Echo — someone with, as Finn put it, the “mental emotional, physical fortitude to go through the rigors of playing a character like this.”But there was still a lot to learn — on all sides. Of all the new experiences that came flying Cox’s way, she most enjoyed stunt training, learning five days a week how to deliver a swift kick and a powerful jab. Cox is an amputee who uses a prosthetic leg, but that had never stopped her from roughhousing, she said.“I have a brother that’s a year older than me, and we were always rough with each other growing up,” she said. “I had to get him; I was very stubborn! He toughened me up a little bit, so it was easy for me to pick up those kinds of stunts.”By the time Finn was casting for “Hawkeye,” there was already talk of a potential spinoff for the character, Finn said. Cox didn’t learn a new series was in the works until she was halfway through filming her “Hawkeye” scenes. The news came as a surprise, to say the least. Filming for “Echo” began in April 2022, and Cox jumped right in.“One of the very first questions she asked when we first talked was ‘Can I do my own stunts?’” Sydney Freeland, the series showrunner, said of Cox. “I was like, ‘Yeah, go for it!’ She was down to get in there, take some lumps and take some bruises.”“Her entire filming experience before ‘Echo’ was a few days on ‘Hawkeye,’” added Freeland, who also directed episodes. “For her to go from that small sample size to being the lead of a Marvel series, that is a tremendous ask for even the most seasoned actor.”Cox did extensive stunt training to prepare for her role as Maya Lopez, better known as Echo, learning five days a week how to deliver a swift kick and a powerful jab.Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel StudiosWhether Cox was peeling out on a motorcycle or leaping from a moving freight train (while wearing a safety harness, of course), Change or another interpreter were positioned in her sightline, ready to relay the director’s next instructions.But Cox had another key preproduction request of Freeland and her team: Take A.S.L. classes.“I said, ‘Be able to communicate in basic sign language with me,’” Cox said. Many of the cast members learned, taking signing classes a few times a week, she said — several characters use A.S.L. onscreen to communicate with Maya — as did many key members of the crew, including Freeland. “It was really nice when we got on set,” Cox added. “They were able to sign ‘How are you?’ and ‘Do you need to go to the bathroom?’ — those kinds of simple things.”Freeland was reluctant to give herself too much credit: “She’s very generous to say that I learned A.S.L.,” she said. “It was probably like talking to a toddler for her. But she’s beyond gracious and beyond patient.”“Echo” was shot in and around Atlanta, far from Cox’s tight-knit community in Wisconsin. Filming took about three months, and Cox didn’t have any family or friends in the area. It helped being surrounded by a predominantly Indigenous cast, which included Tantoo Cardinal, Graham Greene, Devery Jacobs and Cody Lightning. “It just felt so homey,” she said. “They were like cousins or sisters immediately.”Cox considers it an honor to play Marvel’s first deaf Indigenous superhero, and to provide mainstream representation for amputees. But the success has been bittersweet. Her father — the ultimate fan of both Marvel and his daughter — died in 2021, the same week her character’s father (Zahn McClarnon), who is also named William, was shown meeting his untimely demise in “Hawkeye.”“All of a sudden, these two worlds have collided,” Cox said. “And it was so heart-wrenching.”“But he was so proud of me,” she went on, speaking of her father. “I know he’s looking down on me from heaven, and he’s just cheering me on. I absolutely know it and feel it.” More

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      in Movies

      Lily Gladstone on ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      In college, Lily Gladstone studied the history of Native American actors in Hollywood. Now, she’s making it.The 37-year-old actress has been checking off all sorts of awards-season firsts thanks to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the Martin Scorsese-directed period drama in which she plays Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose relatives are systematically murdered by her husband (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle (Robert De Niro) in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land. If Mollie is the movie’s conscience, Gladstone is its center of gravity: Even when she shares scenes with A-listers like DiCaprio and De Niro, the film bends to her.That portrayal has so far earned Gladstone a best-actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle and nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, and major nods from the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy Awards are likely to come in the weeks ahead. In the run-up to those ceremonies, Gladstone has been a hotly pursued presence for round tables and events on both coasts, and she’s taken to those opportunities with such command — using her platform to amplify other Native voices and concerns — that you’d never know that she wasn’t used to this, or that for a long time, she was hesitant to engage with Hollywood at all.“There’s a handful of people who love film that have been aware of my career for a while, but this has been like being shot out of a cannon,” Gladstone said, tracing the far-flung route that has led her to all those awards-show ballrooms. “My dad’s a boilermaker, my mom was a teacher. I was raised on a reservation, went to public school. It’s a very normal, sort of working-class upbringing in one way, and in another way, I’m just a rez girl.”Onscreen, Gladstone has the profile and indomitable presence of a 1940s film star. In person, when we met last month at a rooftop restaurant in Beverly Hills, Gladstone was more approachable but every bit as striking, with vivid brown eyes that her father once warned her were eminently readable. He said this mostly to dissuade her from telling lies, but he was right: When we feel for Mollie, it’s because of the fear and righteous indignation that Gladstone can convey in just a look.She also has a wry sense of humor, glimpsed in some of the Scorsese film’s lighter moments, and an ability to punctuate her conversation topics and awards-season speeches with an impressive command of history and facts. “Lily is a big nerd wrapped up in this very giving, curious person,” said the director Erica Tremblay, whose film “Fancy Dance” starred Gladstone. “If you’re at a dinner party with Lily, you’re going to find yourself talking about physics and bumblebees — and when I say she’ll be talking about physics, she’ll be talking about some very specific theory that Lily will know the mechanics of inside and out.”Awards season has meant perks like being interviewed by her favorite actress, Cate Blanchett. “I’m hugging myself right now,” Gladstone said. “I know your readers can’t see that.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesAt an Elle event in December celebrating women in Hollywood, Gladstone was honored alongside the likes of Jennifer Lopez, America Ferrera and Jodie Foster, but she particularly sparked to meeting the academic Stacy L. Smith, whose University of Southern California think tank, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, had recently issued a report about Native American representation in Hollywood. After analyzing 1,600 films released from 2007 to 2022, Smith found that the amount of speaking roles for Native American actors was virtually nil, less than one quarter of 1 percent of all the roles cataloged.A leading role like Gladstone’s in a film the size of “Killers” isn’t just unusual, it’s unprecedented, so much so that Smith subtitled her report, “The Lily Gladstone Effect.” Gladstone can hardly wrap her head around that recognition. “It’s the kind of paper that if I were a student now taking the same class, I would be citing in my studies,” she said.For DiCaprio, Gladstone has more than earned the plaudits. “To see her rise to this occasion and be somebody that’s so formidable as far as understanding the depth of her own industry and Native American history, it’s an incredible moment to be a part of,” he said in a phone call. “I’m just glad to be next to her.”To tout his co-star, DiCaprio has been a willing participant in the sort of red-carpet photo opportunities and awards-season parties he’d normally eschew. “It’s insane,” Gladstone said. “It’s like I’m trotting this mythical creature around, out and about, and he’s doing so of his own volition.” The ante was upped even further when Gladstone learned that her favorite actress, Cate Blanchett, would conduct a Q. and A. with her after “Killers” screened in London. “I’m hugging myself right now, I know your readers can’t see that,” she told me.Gladstone acknowledged that sometimes, the intensity of the awards-season spotlight can feel overwhelming. “I can’t speak from the heart if I’m not connected to what’s real about all this,” she said. In those moments, she endeavors to carry her community forward with her: “I know that all of this attention on me right now means so much more than just me.”In other words, don’t expect Gladstone to come out of this experience transformed into a demanding Hollywood diva, as so many have before her. She can’t be bowled over, onscreen or off.“I’ve talked to a lot of people who know Lily Gladstone and have been friends with her for a long time and seen this journey, and she is so steadfast and so immovable in terms of her values and her core,” Tremblay said. “I think she’ll be exactly the same, but with fancier clothes.”Gladstone is “so formidable as far as understanding the depth of her own industry and Native American history,” her “Killers” co-star Leonardo DiCaprio said.Apple TV+AS A CHILD growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana, there was one week that Gladstone looked forward to all year, when the Missoula Children’s Theater would roll up in a little red truck, construct a set out of P.V.C. pipes and cloth backdrops, and cast local kids in a production that the whole community would come out to see at the end of the week. “I was bullied a lot when I was a kid, partly because I was just goofy,” Gladstone said. “But that one week a year is when I was cool.”In the group’s production of “Cinderella,” the young Gladstone decided to play her ugly stepsister as if she were Roseanne Barr, studying how to walk and talk like the comedian. It was a lightning-strike moment when she realized that a little bit of craft could go a long way.“Somebody picked up on that in the audience and said, ‘She’s funnier than Roseanne,’” Gladstone said. “And my parents reminded me that somebody there from our community said, ‘We’re going to see her at the Oscars one day,’ just from that.”Performing has always been Gladstone’s true north, the place to which her inner compass is most attuned. She remembers watching “Return of the Jedi” at 5 and feeling such a strong desire to be an Ewok that she knew someday, she’d be on the other side of the screen. Similarly obsessed with “The Nutcracker,” Gladstone signed up for ballet, which she assumed would be the big performative outlet in her life until the body shaming became too tough to take: “Not just weight, but things like, ‘Your middle toe is too long,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, my grandma gave me that middle toe!’”But even in ballet class, instructors told her she was a natural-born actress, less concerned with nailing movements than with communicating a character. In her teenage years, when Gladstone’s family moved from Montana to the sometimes alienating suburbs of Seattle, she plunged fully into performance, acting in off-campus plays and auditioning for independent films. During her senior year, fellow students voted her “Most Likely to Win an Oscar.” They could already tell that acting was something she lived and breathed.“It gave me an identity when my identity was forming and reforming,” she said. “Being known as an actress felt good even when I wasn’t working, even before I got my SAG card, when people asked what I did: ‘Yeah, I’m working at Staples right now, but I’m an actress.’”In her 20s, many of Gladstone’s actor friends moved to New York or Los Angeles, but she was reluctant to follow suit. “I knew if I came to L.A. and was doing audition after audition, it would be really difficult for me,” she said. “And I knew how easily my love of ballet had been shot down by these boxes that I couldn’t fit in, so I was like, ‘I’m going to protect this a little bit.’”The boxes in Hollywood can be pernicious, and Gladstone is still wary of them. “I know myself and I know I’m difficult to cast,” she said. “I’m kind of ‘mid’ in a lot of ways.” Gladstone hastened to add that she didn’t mean “mid” like meh, dismissively as Gen Z uses it. Instead, she meant the word quite literally. She is in-between, hard to place, neither this nor that. Part of it is that she’s mixed-race: Her father is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, her mother white. But there is another part, too.“It’s kind of being middle-gendered, I guess,” said Gladstone, who uses both “she” and “they” pronouns. “I’ve always known I’m comfortable claiming being a woman, but I never feel more than when I’m in a group of all women that I’m not fully this either.”Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie “Certain Women” proved a breakthrough moment for Gladstone.Jojo Whilden/IFC FilmsShe recalled a heartfelt moment at Elle’s Women in Hollywood event when Jodie Foster told the nonbinary “The Last of Us” actor Bella Ramsey that the room was full of supportive sisters. “That’s wonderful and that’s true,” Gladstone said, but afterward she went up to Ramsey to “introduce myself and let them know, ‘You also have siblings here, too.’”Instead of moving to Hollywood, where she might have been prodded into walking a narrower path, Gladstone spent her postgraduate years in Montana, doing theater and renting out basements with like-minded performers just to make something. Working in independent films and Native-centric productions allowed her to qualify for the Screen Actors Guild without ever having to move her home base, and a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie “Certain Women” raised her profile considerably. Still, the mega-budgeted “Killers of the Flower Moon” represents a comparative quantum leap: Though Gladstone was unsure about coming to Hollywood, in the end, Hollywood came to her.It’s a heady thing to go from semi-known to perceived on a major scale, as Gladstone found out during the film’s mammoth Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, when photos of her walking the red carpet with DiCaprio were beamed all over the world. But the actual premiere of “Killers” in October provided an unexpected respite, since the actors’ strike at the time prevented Gladstone from promoting it.A silver lining was the number of Osage people who instead spoke at the movie’s premiere, enjoying the sort of red-carpet moments that would have typically gone to the film’s striking actors. Watching them discuss and debate “Killers” reminded Gladstone that she was raised to listen to her elders, and the strike-imposed silence provided the perfect opportunity to collect her thoughts and reflect.“There’s a level of ego that is wrapped up with being a public person speaking for other people, and a level of ego it takes being an actor, too,” she said. “So I think it was a real gift to be able to sit there and have another reminder that this is way bigger than me.”She spent the film’s opening day on a picket line in Times Square, marching back and forth in the rain near the New York headquarters of Paramount Pictures, the studio that distributed “Killers” with Apple. “It was a little bit of my contrarian nature to choose Paramount that day,” Gladstone admitted with a grin. Later, while dining at an Italian restaurant in the city, a couple sitting next to her asked if she was Lily Gladstone from “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It was the first time she felt permission to own it.“I was like, ‘Yes, I am. Today, I am Lily Gladstone.’” Months later, recounting the story, she was still beaming.“If you’re at a dinner party with Lily, you’re going to find yourself talking about physics and bumblebees,” said Gladstone’s “Fancy Dance” director, Erica Tremblay.Thea Traff for The New York TimesIF GLADSTONE IS nominated for a best actress Academy Award on Jan. 23, she’ll be the first Native American contender in that category. With a win, she’d become the first Native performer to earn a competitive acting Oscar.Still, it’s one thing for Hollywood to celebrate underrepresented actors, and a whole other thing to actually provide for them afterward. Academy members were moved to vote for recent winners like Troy Kotsur (“CODA”) and Ke Huy Quan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) in part because of their inspiring personal narratives, but follow-up projects on par with their winning films can be hard to come by. DiCaprio hopes that Gladstone’s breakthrough year will finally change things.“I think she realizes that this really is a historical moment,” he said. “I know she has a plethora of other stories that she wants to tell, and I want her to be given those opportunities.”Whatever this season has in store, Gladstone is ready to make the most of it. At a recent Academy Museum gala, the Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly asked to meet Gladstone and wondered whether the demands of campaigning had already run her ragged. Gladstone was surprised to find herself replying that so far, she was doing just fine: “Maybe it says something about me that I’m kind of enjoying all of this right now.”The wider world appears invested in her success, too. After “Killers” received a standing ovation at Cannes, a clip of Gladstone’s moved reaction to the applause earned millions of views. Why does she think that video went viral, with so many excited commenters predicting the Oscar glory that now appears within reach?“I think people root for folks that come up from the grass roots having this global-stage moment, this dream coming true,” she said. “That’s something that I wish on everybody at some point in their lives, in whatever form that takes, and also for Native people.”Gladstone confessed that she had watched the Cannes clip “about a thousand times” since the premiere: “It’s a moment of transcendence that was wonderful to have captured.” But the moment was about more than just her own time in the spotlight: She recalled the way her Native co-star William Belleau let out a whooping war cry during the ovation and how the applause for the women playing her sisters — Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins and Jillian Dion — prompted Gladstone to let out a trilling lele. It wasn’t just a celebration. It was a release.“Whatever that oppressive system is that sometimes develops with colonial governments, that moment of transcendence for all of us, those are the healing moments,” Gladstone said. “Those are the ones that show people very clearly that we’re still here and we’re excellent. We’ve survived and we’re just soaring now.” More

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      What ‘Pocahontas’ Tells Us About Disney, for Better and Worse

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      The animated tale was both controversial and an Oscar-winning box office hit. It’s also one of the rare films from that era that the company isn’t eager to remake.Disney’s animated achievements — certain ones — are imprinted on our brains, in part because the company reminds us about them seemingly nonstop. Fresh from the Disney vault! Restored to its original glory!“Wish,” which arrived last month as part of Disney’s centennial self-celebration, is a collection of callbacks to classics like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), “Sleeping Beauty” (1959), “The Little Mermaid” (1989) and “The Lion King” (1994). Disney theme parks have recently unveiled attractions based on “Frozen” (2013) and “Moana” (2016), among others.But there are also films in Disney’s animated canon that the image-conscious company does not talk about much, and the reasons are usually obvious. Some were box office failures. A few of the older ones traffic in racist stereotypes.If we are going to look back at Disney’s history with animated movies, however, as the company has invited people to do with its 100th anniversary bash, the problem films should be part of the discussion. To wrestle with Disney and its legacy — the good and the bad, the past and the present — the misfires sometimes offer as much insight as the masterworks.Consider “Pocahontas.”Released in 1995 at a time when Walt Disney Animation Studios was experiencing a creative renaissance, “Pocahontas” pulls from history and legend to recount — sort of — the story of the real-life Native American girl who, in 1607, supposedly saved an English settler, John Smith, after he’d been taken as prisoner by her father’s tribe. The film won two Oscars (for song and score) and was celebrated by leading critics for its vibrant color palette and magical realism (a murmuration of autumn leaves, the advice-giving Grandmother Willow). Janet Maslin, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, called it a “landmark feat of animation.”“Pocahontas” also has some severe problems, starting with the title character. Disney depicted her not as a girl of about 11, as historians agree Pocahontas was at the time she interacted with Smith, but as an ultra-voluptuous young woman. Disney took other extreme liberties with the story, in particular inventing a romance between Pocahontas, who was voiced by Irene Bedard, and Smith (Mel Gibson). Disney higher-ups pressed the “Pocahontas” creative team to make it more like “Beauty and the Beast,” which had been a runaway hit at the box office — presto, a romance.The character was portrayed not as a young girl but as a voluptuous woman.Buena Vista Pictures/Disney, via Everett Collection“Disney made a lot of unfortunate decisions with this movie,” said Angela Aleiss, a film scholar whose books include “Hollywood’s Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance.”“It should be a lesson,” she added of “Pocahontas,” which was directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg. “Why not let Indigenous people tell these stories?”Recent Disney films like the animated “Strange World,” with its gay teenage protagonist, have become cultural flash points. But “Pocahontas” prompted a full-blown fracas. Some people accused Disney of whitewashing history — for leaving out the fact, for instance, that Pocahontas died at 21, perhaps of smallpox, after being taken to London and paraded around as an example of a “civilized savage.” Others blasted “Pocahontas” for depicting some white settlers as bigoted plunderers (though historians would argue this was accurate). Some Native Americans winced at the ways in which the film perpetuated the Good Indian stereotype, which posits that worthy Native Americans were those who helped white immigrants. Psychologists complained that Disney’s rendering of the heroine gave girls yet another impossible body standard to live up to.For these reasons, “Pocahontas” lives in a netherworld at Disney.The company does not hide it. The movie is available on Disney+, and the character is designated an official Disney Princess. “Wish” contains a couple of subtle references to the film. But bring up “Pocahontas” at Disney headquarters, and people get visibly tense. The vibe is: Let’s please change the subject. A couple of years ago, Disney decided that “Pocahontas” would be one of the few animated hits that would not be remade as a live-action spectacle. Too fraught, especially in the social media era. (“Pocahontas” was very much a hit. It cost about $112 million in today’s dollars, and collected $707 million — less than the Disney movies that preceded it, but a lot of dough all the same.)Disney declined to comment for this article.Animation historians contend that “Pocahontas” is more important than most people realize — that the film’s challenges have obscured its true standing in Disney’s animated oeuvre.“Pocahontas,” for instance, “marked a new turn in Disney storytelling toward empowered heroines,” said Mindy Johnson, an animation scholar whose books include “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation.” Johnson added, “Many credit this to ‘Mulan.’ But ‘Pocahontas’ paved the way.”Despite its invented romance, the film ends with Pocahontas spurning John Smith’s invitation to go with him to England. She chooses to stay with her tribe.“Pocahontas” was the first animated Disney film to focus on a woman of color. It was the first (and only) time that Disney made an animated movie about a real person. And in many ways, it was Disney’s first overt “issues” movie for children. Developed in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, “Pocahontas” explored the idea that “if we don’t learn to live with one another, we will destroy ourselves,” as Peter Schneider, then Disney’s animation president, put it in “The Art of Pocahontas” by Stephen Rebello.“Environmental messages are equally present and so relevant, especially today,” Johnson said.Disney movies had always had a moral, but this went much further — and the film’s implicit political message freaked some people out: Disney is messing with our kids. The uproar helped push the company back toward lighter material, resulting in comedies like “The Emperor’s New Groove” and “Lilo & Stitch.”After “Beauty and the Beast” proved a hit, Disney executives pushed the “Pocahontas” filmmakers to make it romance.Buena Vista Pictures/Disney, via Everett CollectionA similar shift is going on right now at Disney. The company has become a political punching bag, partly because it has added openly gay, lesbian and queer characters to its animated movies. The emphasis on diversity in some of Disney’s live-action films, including “The Little Mermaid,” “The Marvels” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” has also led to fan complaints. Although Disney has also received positive feedback, the blowback — and poor ticket sales for some of the films in question — has prompted Disney to retrench.“Creators lost sight of what their No. 1 objective needed to be,” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said at the DealBook Summit last month. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”It should be noted that “Pocahontas” has plenty of fans. Some point to the clever, sweeping ways in which the film’s songs are visualized. Alan Menken (“The Little Mermaid”) and Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked”) wrote the music, which includes the Oscar-winning “Colors of the Wind,” sung by Judy Kuhn.“A graceful and well-intentioned entry in the Disney canon,” Sophie Gilbert wrote in a 2015 essay in The Atlantic that defended the film as progressive and feminist. (The magazine also published letters from readers who did not agree.)Hanay Geiogamah, a former director of the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, was hired by Disney in the 1990s to consult on “Pocahontas” and its straight-to-video sequel, “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World.” In a phone interview, he called working with Disney “a really positive experience,” noting that some of his concerns about authenticity (the depiction of dancing and ceremonies, for instance) led to prerelease changes in the film.“I understood why people were upset, and, at the time, I made my voice heard, too,” Geiogamah said. “But you have to remember, at the end of the day, this was a Disney animated fantasy. I was actually pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. Yes, there was a falsity at its core. But it also gave millions of young people a positive impression of Indian life. It wasn’t all battles and ugliness and harshness.”The many opinions are a reminder of how powerful the Disney brand is: People care — they really care.Affinity for the brand runs so deep that it can quickly recover when the company stumbles. Life in the Magic Kingdom goes on. Five months after “Pocahontas” arrived in theaters, tresses swinging, Disney released the first film from an experimental new animation company called Pixar. The movie was “Toy Story,” and the response was so rapturous that “Pocahontas” — and the fighting around it — started to fade into history. More