[ The Academy formally apologized to the Native American activist
and former actress in June after she was blacklisted for representing
the actor at the 1973 Academy Awards.]
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SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER, WHO DELIVERED MARLON BRANDO’S OSCAR
REJECTION SPEECH, DIES AT 75  
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Rebecca Sun
October 2, 2022
The Holllywood Reporter
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_ The Academy formally apologized to the Native American activist and
former actress in June after she was blacklisted for representing the
actor at the 1973 Academy Awards. _

Sacheen Littlefeather at the 1973 Oscars ceremony, Credit: Globe
Photos/Shutterstock // The Telegraph (UK)

 

Sacheen Littlefeather (Apache/Yaqui/Ariz.), the Native American
actress and activist who took to the stage at the 1973 Academy Awards
to reveal that Marlon Brando
[[link removed]] would not accept
his Oscar for _The Godfather_, has died. She was 75.

Littlefeather died at noon Sunday at her home in the Northern
California city of Novato surrounded by her loved ones, according to a
statement sent out by her caretaker. The Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, which reconciled with Littlefeather
[[link removed]] in
June and hosted a celebration
[[link removed]] in
her honor just two weeks ago, revealed the news on social media Sunday
night.

Littlefeather disclosed in March 2018 that she had been diagnosed with
stage 4 breast cancer, and it had metastasized in recent years.

Brando had decided to boycott the March 1973 Oscars
[[link removed]] in protest of how
Native Americans were portrayed onscreen as well as to pay tribute to
the ongoing occupation at Wounded Knee, in which 200 members of the
American Indian Movement (AIM) faced off against thousands of U.S.
marshals and other federal agents in the South Dakota town.

After presenters Liv Ullmann and Roger Moore listed the nominees for
best actor and Ullmann called out Brando’s name as the winner, the
telecast cut to Littlefeather, then 26 and wearing a traditional
Apache dress, walking to the stage from her seat at the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion as the announcer explained, “Accepting the award
for Marlon Brando and _The Godfather_, Miss Sacheen Littlefeather.”

Littlefeather, however, held up her right hand to decline the
statuette proffered by Moore as she reached the podium and told the
Chandler audience and the 85 million viewers watching at home that
Brando “very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award.”

[[link removed]]

Watch here [[link removed]] 

Speaking in measured tones but off-the-cuff — Brando, who told her
not to touch the trophy, had given her a typed eight-page speech, but
telecast producer Howard Koch informed her she had no more than 60
seconds — she continued, “And the reasons for this being are the
treatment of American Indians today by the film industry … and on
television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded
Knee.”

_The New York Times_ published Brando’s entire speech
[[link removed]] three
days later.

Littlefeather’s remarks were met in the building by a smattering of
boos as well as applause, but public sentiment in the immediate
aftermath of her appearance was largely negative. Some media outlets
questioned her Native heritage (her father was Apache and Yaqui and
her mother was white) and claimed she rented her costume for the
ceremony, while conservative celebrities including John Wayne, Clint
Eastwood and Charlton Heston — three actors who had starred in many
a Western — reportedly criticized Brando and Littlefeather’s
actions.

As she was becoming an indelible part of Oscar lore, Wayne “was in
the wings, ready to have me taken off stage,” she told the _Los
Angeles Times_
[[link removed]] in
2016. “He had to be restrained by six security guards.” That may
not have been the case, an investigation showed
[[link removed]].

Regardless, nearly 50 years later, the Academy issued her an apology.

“The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and
unjustified,” then-AMPAS president David Rubin wrote to her in a
letter dated June 18. “The emotional burden you have lived through
and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For
too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we
offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”

“I was stunned. I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be
hearing this, experiencing this,” Littlefeather told
[[link removed]] _The
Hollywood Reporter__._ “When I was at the podium in 1973, I stood
there alone.”

Born Marie Louise Cruz on Nov. 14, 1946, in the coastal California
city of Salinas, Littlefeather was primarily raised by her mother’s
parents. She began exploring her Native identity at California State
University in Hayward and participated in the Native occupation to
attempt to reclaim Alcatraz Island in 1969, and it was her fellow
activist friends who renamed her.

Shortly thereafter, Littlefeather received a full scholarship to study
acting at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. “Dancing
and acting was an escape from reality,” she told _The_ _Native
American Times_
[[link removed]] in
2010.

She got some work in radio and TV ads (including as Miss Vampire USA
for a _Dark Shadows_ soap opera promotion) but found it a struggle
to land substantive parts in Hollywood: “Americans liked the blonde
Sandra Dee look. … I got speaking parts in Italian films because
they liked the exotic.”

In 1972, she participated in a planned _Playboy_ shoot called “Ten
Little Indians” that was scrapped before publication when the
occupation at Wounded Knee began in February 1973. But after
Littlefeather’s Oscar appearance, _Playboy _printed her photos as
a stand-alone feature, further discrediting her in some people’s
eyes.

She had met Brando for the first time a few years earlier when she was
in Washington giving a presentation to the FCC on race and minorities.

“In the ’70s, you had AIM and the Indian Civil Rights Movement and
that was the part that I was in,” she said. “I was a spokesperson,
so to speak, for the stereotype of Native Americans in film and in
television. All I was saying was, ‘We don’t want Chuck Connors
playing Geronimo.'”

When she mentioned to Brando that she didn’t have an evening dress
for the Oscars, “Marlon told me to wear my buckskin,” she said in
the 2018 documentary _Sacheen: Breaking the Silence_.

Three months after the Oscars, Brando appeared on _The Dick Cavett
Show_ and said that he “was embarrassed for Sacheen. She wasn’t
able to say what she intended to say, and I was distressed that people
booed and whistled and stomped even though perhaps it was directed at
myself. They should have at least had the courtesy to listen to
her.”

Although Brando’s stunt had the intended effect of renewing
attention on Wounded Knee, Littlefeather said it put her life at risk
and killed her acting career, claiming that she lost guild memberships
and was banned from the industry. (In addition, the Academy
subsequently prohibited winners from sending proxies to accept — or
reject — awards on their behalf.)

“I was blacklisted — or, you could say, ‘redlisted,'”
Littlefeather said in her documentary. “Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett
and others didn’t want me on their shows. … The doors were closed
tight, never to reopen.”

Littlefeather managed to appear in a handful of films (_The Trial of
Billy Jack_, _Johnny Firecloud _and _Winterhawk__ _among them)
before she quit acting for good and earned a degree in holistic health
from Antioch University with a minor in Native American medicine. Her
work in wellness included writing a health column for the Kiowa tribe
newspaper in Oklahoma, teaching in the traditional Indian medicine
program at St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, and working with
Mother Teresa on behalf of AIDS patients in the Bay Area. She would go
on to serve as a founding board member of the American Indian AIDS
Institute of San Francisco.

Littlefeather also continued her involvement in the arts, co-founding
the nonprofit National American Indian Performing Arts Registry in the
early ’80s, advising on multiple PBS programs and continuing to be
an advocate for Native American inclusion in Hollywood (she appeared
in the 2009 documentary _Reel Injun_).

“I was the first woman of color to ever make a political statement
in the history of the Academy Awards,” Littlefeather said
in _Sacheen_, and at the time, Coretta Scott King and Cesar Chavez
were among the few who publicly praised her Oscar speech.

But over the decades, her onstage advocacy proved a precursor to the
conversation about diversity in Hollywood that continues today, and
Jada Pinkett Smith cited her as an inspiration for her own boycott of
the 2016 Academy Awards (the #OscarsSoWhite ceremony).

The two exchanged emails at the time, with Smith writing, “Thank you
for being one of the brave and courageous to help pave the way for
those of us who need a reminder of the importance to simply be
true.”

Littlefeather will be buried next to her husband, Charles Koshiway
(Otoe/Sac&Fox), in Red Rock, Oklahoma. Koshiway died of blood cancer
in November 2021. The two met 32 years ago at a pow wow at the
University of California at Davis.

“The night before we met, I had a dream that I was introduced to
this good-looking Indian man, and he tipped his white Stetson cowboy
hat and talked in this very soft Oklahoma accent: _‘How’re
yew?'”_ she told _THR_ in August. “The next day, my roommate
and I drove up to the UC Davis pow wow and underneath this white
Stetson cowboy hat was this very handsome Indian man, and the first
thing he did was tip his hat, look in my eyes and say, ‘_How’re
yew?’_ That’s all it took. The man of my dreams.”

Upon receiving the Academy’s apology, Littlefeather said of her late
husband, “His spirit is still here with me, and I know that what he
wanted for me was always justice and reconciliation.” And two weeks
before her death, when she took to an Academy stage for the second
time in her life, at the museum’s celebration in her honor, she knew
her own passing was imminent: “I’m crossing over soon to the
spirit world. And you know, I’m not afraid to die. Because we come
from a we/us/our society. We don’t come from a me/I/myself society.
And we learn to give away from a very young age. When we are honored,
we give.”

A Catholic Requiem Mass for her will be held this month at St. Rita
Church in Fairfax, California, with a reception to follow.
Littlefeather requested that donations be made to the American Indian
Child Resource Center [[link removed]] of Oakland.

In her final public appearance, she spoke again on behalf of all
Native peoples: “I am here accepting this apology, not only for me
alone but as acknowledgment, knowing that it was not only for me, but
for all of our nations that also need to hear and deserve this apology
tonight. Look at our people. Look at each other and be proud that we
stand as survivors, all of us. Please, when I’m gone, always be
reminded that whenever you stand for your truth, you will be keeping
my voice, and the voices of our nations, and our people, alive.”

* Sacheen Littlefeather
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* Native Americans
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* Indigenous peoples
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* Marlin Brando
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* Films
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* Hollywood
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* Wounded Knee
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* Academy Awards
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