Rise to Fame
In August 2020, they were seriously considering a USDA gig tracking murder hornets in Montana when Scorsese's people called. That call led to Killers of the Flower Moon, which eventually got rewritten to center Mollie Burkhart's perspective around them. The setup for that Zoom, though, was years in the making. Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women (2016) established them as someone who could carry a scene on pure stillness, playing a rancher's quiet crush on Kristen Stewart with almost no dialogue. Scorsese wasn't hiring blind.
In the Spotlight
In January 2024, they became the first Indigenous person to win an acting Golden Globe, opening the speech in the Blackfeet language. The Oscar nomination for Best Actress made them the first Native American in that category. They didn't win (Emma Stone took it for Poor Things), but the nomination itself was the story. Since then, the project choices have been deliberate: a Hulu detective drama (Under the Bridge), small indie work (Jazzy), and a spot in Amazon's Thomas Crown Affair remake with Michael B. Jordan. They're not trading on the moment. They're outlasting it.
Side Notes
Their they/them pronoun use comes with a specific argument: most Native languages, Blackfeet included, have no gendered pronouns, so using they/them is framed as decolonizing gender. Their paternal great-great-grandfather was Kainai Nation chief Red Crow. They're also, somehow, distantly related to British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone through a cousin line, which is either a quirk of history or a perfect metaphor for colonialism. High school classmates voted them 'Most Likely to Win an Oscar.' That one aged well.