Lily Gladstone Reflects on Her Blackfeet Connection to Buffalo and How It Mirrored Her Career Breakthrough (Exclusive)

For as long as she can remember, Lily Gladstone has known that buffalo are integral to who she is as a person. 

The Oscar-nominated star of Killers of the Flower Moon, who was raised on the Blackfeet Reservation and whose father is of Piegan Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, helps to explore the animal’s significance as narrator and executive producer of the new documentary Bring Them Home. 

“It's kind of hard to pinpoint an exact moment,” Gladstone tells PEOPLE of when she first learned about the significance of the animal. “Because it's one of those things you're just raised with, an absolute knowledge and awareness that they're central. They're like the heartbeat of who you are as a people.”

The film, which premiered on PBS on Nov. 24 and was directed by Ivan MacDonald, Ivy MacDonald and Daniel Glick, dives into the Blackfeet people’s generations-long connection to buffalo — specifically, the American bison — and how at one point, they found more than 500 uses for its body, from food to creating children's toys. 

This all changed in the late 1800s when buffalo and Blackfeet people were targeted amid Westward expansion in the United States. 

Buffalo were nearly pushed to extinction. While the species’ population was estimated to be between 30 and 60 million at the start of the 19th century, only a few hundred remained in the late 1880s, per the National Park Services. The fallout from the near-decimation has had long-lasting effects on the surviving Blackfeet people, who face an “ongoing crisis of identity,” Gladstone says in the film, after being pushed to assimilate and let go of integral parts of their culture such as language.  

Over the years, efforts had been made to reintroduce buffalo to Blackfeet tribal land, but they've faced opposition from ranchers — even some Blackfeet people who had "adopted the cowboy way" — who saw buffalo as a threat to their cattle. In 2023, after years of education and advocacy, the efforts were successful, and 49 buffalo were released at the base of Chief Mountain — a significant landmark for the Blackfeet people — near Glacier National Park in Montana.

That moment, captured on film in the finale of the documentary, is one of Gladstone's favorites. 

“The beautiful footage of seeing this herd just almost beeline it, like they knew exactly where to go when they hit the land,” Gladstone says. “And it's what we're always told as Blackfoot people, too, all across the confederacy, if you can see the Ninastako — if you can see Chief Mountain — then you’re home.”

“I never thought I would see anything like that in my lifetime,” she adds. “I thought I'd be an old, old woman before anything like that would be possible.”

To this day, Gladstone says, it feels as if the buffalo’s journey has run parallel to her own. Though she wasn’t there in person to witness their release in June of 2023, it was for a good reason. 

"I was on set filming [Killers of the Flower Moon] with Martin Scorsese, and it was the only reason that I wasn't there to watch those buffalo return to Chief Mountain that day," she she says. "Knowing that was going on, it just felt, I don't know, it's always felt really concurrent."

“It's always kind of felt like any momentum I've gained career-wise, it feels like there's a giant buffalo run behind it,” she adds. “I feel like it's been really hand in hand, the way that my career has grown and exploded has been in such a lockstep matched pace with the way the buffalo returned to us."

Bring Them Home is available to watch now on PBS.