Robbie Robertson’s Best Score nomination is a historic first for Indigenous representation

Since the Oscar nominations came out, everyone’s been talking about Martin Scorcese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), a historical drama that centers on the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma. The movie itself has swept the Oscars, securing ten nominations, most notably Lily Gladstone’s landmark nomination for Best Actress. Gladstone has made history as the first Native American nominee for Best Actress in the Oscars’ entire 96-year run, and the press that feat has generated is astounding. Gladstone is well-deserving of her recent acclaim, especially when considering how long it took for a Native American actress to be nominated in the Best Actress category, as well as the significant (at best) lack of Indigenous representation, and bouts of anti-Indigenous violence (at worst – see John Wayne’s alleged assault of Sacheen Littlefeather at the 1973 awards), throughout Oscars history.

And yet, there is another nomination for Killers that has generated much less press, but is a similarly historic first for Indigenous representation at the Oscars. Nominated posthumously after his death in August 2023, Killers of the Flower Moon composer Robbie Robertson is the first Indigenous person to ever be nominated in the Best Score category. Robertson is best remembered for his large back-catalogue of the 1960s and 70s, performing with his musical group The Band, penning classics of American folk-rock like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “The Weight,” and playing sessions and live shows with other famous musicians of the time like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Emmylou Harris. Robertson’s first collaboration with Killers director Martin Scorcese was on the concert film The Last Waltz (1978), a star-studded live concert developed by Robertson and Scorcese for performance in 1976, filmed, and released to the public in 1978 to much critical and audience acclaim. After The Last Waltz, Robertson would embark on a long string of collaborations with Scorcese, assisting him on music selection for the films Raging Bull (1980) and The King of Comedy (1983), and scoring films starting with The Color of Money (1986), notably including The Irishman (2019), and ending with, of course, Killers of the Flower Moon shortly before his death. 

Robertson himself is First Nations, of Cayuga and Mohawk ancestry, and has experimented with a unique blend of native music, folk and his signature blues-rock since the early 1990s. In 1994, Robertson would form a First Nations Group known as the Red Road Ensemble for his album Music For the Native Americans (1994), an album that intertwined his upbringing with First Nations history and ecological concerns including the near-extinction of the bison. In 1998, Robertson would work on another native-influenced album, this time in the rock-electronica genre, that examined traditional practices, sampled Native American singers, and featured a title, Contact from the Underworld of Redboy, pulled directly from the racially-motivated teasing he experienced in his childhood. By the time he composed for Killers of the Flower Moon at the age of 78, Robertson was determined to follow through on his experimental meshing of genres, keeping all the flavor of native music, without relying on tired Hollywood stereotypes of what native music ‘should’ sound like.

The result is a score that is equal parts bluesy and gritty as it is light, percussive and brimming with color. Robertson utilized traditional native instrumental techniques, such as establishing a constant drone or rhythm behind a melody that dips and sways, but remained authentic to his own musician’s voice, established during the folk-rock boom of the 1960s and 70s, and honed to various degrees of soulfulness in the decades to follow. Robertson’s score is a haunting backdrop to the horrors Killers of the Flower Moon portrays, and though the project was to be his last, it remains a standout score in his long history of musicianship, both for its personal meaning to Robertson’s First Nations identity and its incredible contribution to the film’s storytelling. 

Article by Gianna Caudillo