Lily Gladstone Explains How Her Pronouns Connect to Her Indigenous Heritage | Lily Gladstone | Just Jared: Celebrity News and Gossip

Lily Gladstone is opening up about her preferred pronouns.

If you weren’t aware, the 37-year-old actress is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage. For the first decade of her life, she lived on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana.

Lily recently explained how her Native American roots have impacted her views on gender and pronouns.

Keep reading to find out more…

“I remember being 9 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,” Lily told People.

“It happens to a lot of kids, I think, especially Native boys leaving a community where long hair is celebrated [and then] just kind of getting teased for it, so I remember back then being like, everybody should just be they.”

The Killers of the Flower Moon star continued, “And in most Native languages, most Indigenous languages, Blackfeet included, there are no gendered pronouns. There is no he/she, there’s only they. So Blackfeet, we don’t have gendered pronouns, but our gender is implied in our name. But even that’s not binary,”

Lily concluded that her choice of pronouns “is partly a way of decolonizing gender for myself.”

The star also addressed the topic of gendered categories at awards shows.

“I think it’s really cool that we’re seeing ‘performer’ and we’re seeing everybody brought in together. I do feel that historically having gendered categories has helped from keeping women actors from a lot of erasure because I think historically people just tend to honor male performances more,” she said.

Lily then questioned the purpose of gendered terms in the film industry.

“I know a lot of actresses who are very proud of the word ‘actress’ or are very proud of being an actress,” she said. “I don’t know, maybe it’s just an overly semantic thing where I’m like, if there’s not a ‘director-ess,’ then there shouldn’t be actresses. There’s no ‘producer-ess,’ there’s no ‘cinematographer-ess.’ ”

If you missed it, Lily Gladstone revealed that she used her allowance on a Leonardo DiCaprio movie VHS 25 years before co-starring with him in Killers of the Flower Moon!