Lily Gladstone is digging down on her criticism of the Kansas City Chiefs after speaking out against Native American “misrepresentation” at Super Bowl LVIII.
The “Killers of the Flower Moon” star, who is the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars, explained on Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast that both the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers should be held “accountable” for their team names, but Gladstone is particularly concerned about the Chiefs’ controversial Tomahawk chop.
“Honestly, you could hold both teams accountable,” Gladstone, 37, stated in the episode that aired Thursday.
“The 49ers are based on the California Gold Rush, which was a particularly terrible period for California Indians. Next came the Chiefs. There are numerous ways to interpret the name ‘chief.’ The name doesn’t annoy me. It’s hearing the darn Tomahawk chop.
The “Tomahawk chop” is a gesture and cry used by Chiefs fans to demonstrate their support for the team. It involves raising one’s arm up and down in a chop motion.
“Every time, it’s a stark reminder of what Hollywood has done to us because the Tomahawk chop directly ties to the sounds of old Westerns where we were not playing ourselves, or if we were, we were merely backdrop actors,” Gladstone went on to say.
“It’s this ‘claiming’ of that sound and saying it’s in ‘honor’ and the commodification of who we are as people,” she said. “It’s great to love the game and your players, but it still hurts.”
The Chiefs have long faced criticism for not rebranding in an era when the Washington Redskins officially became the Commanders in February 2022 and the MLB’s Cleveland Indians became the Guardians in November 2021.
The Chiefs, for their part, prohibited fans from painting their faces or wearing headdresses to games in 2020, and retired their mascot, a horse named Warpaint, the following year.
Gladstone’s recent criticism comes after she discussed her record-breaking, yet “long overdue” Oscar nomination last week at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
“But that’s a lot of history and a lot of years of exclusion or misrepresentation, and I mean Super Bowl’s tomorrow,” she went on to say. “We haven’t come that far if we look at one of the teams that’s playing.”
Jimmy Kimmel will host the Oscars on March 10 on ABC.
