The iconic First Nations actress boasts a resume that runs the gamut from Dances with Wolves to Killers of the Flower Moon.
The C&I crew wanted to send early birthday greetings to renowned First Nations actress Tantoo Cardinal — she was born July 20, 1950 in Alberta, Canada — and celebrate her life and career by looking back at some of her most memorable film and TV roles.
Trouble is, there are so many outstanding credits on her resume that it’s difficult to pick just one or two or more to watch on her special day.
Should we select her international breakthrough in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves? After all, the late Roger Ebert singled out for special praise her portrayal of Black Shawl, wife of Lakota Sioux medicine man Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) and matchmaker for John Dunbar (Costner) and Stands with a Fist (Mary McDonnell)?
Or maybe we should jump ahead three decades or so to the Marvel Comics limited-run series Echo, and enjoy her reunion with Greene? They have some very amusing scenes together — sometimes tense, sometimes flirty, all of them delightful — and, arguably more important, she gets to engage in some climactic ass-kicking to assist the title character, a.k.a. Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox).
Perhaps we should go back to 1986 and watch Loyalties, the acclaimed Canadian thriller for which she nominated for a Genie Award — the Canadian equivalent of an Oscar — in the Best Actress category? She made a memorably potent impact as Rosanne Ladouceur, a housekeeper trying to protect the abused wife (Susan Wooldridge) of a pedophile doctor (David Sutton).
Or how about taking another look at her brief but impactful supporting performance in Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017) as Alice Crowheart, the grieving mother of a murdered Indigenous woman, who can barely express the agony she’s feeling in mere words? Or rerunning Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, to again appreciate her work as Lizzie Q, who rightly suspects the worst of her white neighbors — and fears the worst for her daughter Mollie (Lily Gladstone) — when newly oil-rich Osage Nation members start turning up dead?
“Being in films that represent so much is kind of my path — telling those stories that haven’t been told or haven’t been told properly,” Cardinal wrote in an essay for New Beauty earlier this year. Killers of the Flower Moon “was kind of a shock, I suppose, for a lot of people to realize that this is a part of our collective history. Even though a lot of people know that Indigenous people have been hard done by America in the past, there are still some who think that we got what we deserved.
“Ultimately, I’m hoping that it will open more funding for our storytellers to be able to tell things properly. Movies like Killers of the Flower Moon are helpful for generating curiosity and new funding opportunities that we can use to tell authentic stories that can be shared with generations to come. It’s been a testament to the preservation of creation, which is powerful and its own kind of beauty.
“I think it’s getting better. I know that the dandelion will continue to grow out through the pavement, and I trust that there’s going to be work for me.”
And while we’re waiting for the next great Tantoo Cardinal performance, we want to share this wide-ranging interview with the great lady herself.
