<
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/lily-gladstone-she-they-pronouns-decolonizing-gender-1235777244/>
"
Killers of the Flower Moon star Lily Gladstone has opened up about how using
she/they pronouns is connected to the performer’s Indigenous background and
“partly a way of decolonizing gender.”
In a new interview with
People, Gladstone — who was raised on the Blackfeet
Nation reservation in Montana by a father of Blackfeet and Nimiipuu heritage
and a white mother — says that “in most Native languages, most Indigenous
languages, Blackfeet included, there are no gendered pronouns. There is no
he/she, there’s only they.”
And within the Blackfeet community specifically, Gladstone says, “we don’t have
gendered pronouns, but our gender is implied in our name.”
“Even that’s not binary,” Gladstone adds, explaining how a grandfather had a
Blackfeet name that meant “Iron Woman.”
“He had a name that had a woman’s name in it,” Gladstone says. “I’d never met
my grandfather. I wouldn’t say that he was nonbinary in gender, but he was
given a woman’s name because he kind of carried himself, I guess, the way that
women who have that name do.”
Gladstone adds, “And there were lots of women historically and still now who
are given men’s names. They fulfill more of a man’s role in society as far as
being provider, warrior, those sort of things.”
Speaking about personal pronoun preferences, Gladstone says, “my pronoun use is
partly a way of decolonizing gender for myself.”
Beyond that, Gladstone says the she/they pronouns is a way of the performer
“embracing that when I’m in a group of ladies, I know that I’m a little bit
different. When I’m in a group of men, I don’t feel like a man. I don’t feel
[masculine] at all. I feel probably more feminine when I’m around other men.”
“In ceremony, a lot of times where you sit in the circle is a gendered thing,”
Gladstone says. “I happen to sit in circles that are very embracing of all of
our people. And I’ve seen people change where they sit in the circle based upon
how they’re feeling that day.
Gladstone also recalls realizing early on that “they” might be preferable to
gendered pronouns.
“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,” Gladstone says. “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.”"
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
