The Academy Awards ceremony has always tried to avoid controversy, but on 27 March 1973, during the first Oscars show broadcast by satellite around the world, Sacheen Littlefeather came to the dais to receive the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando.
Littlefeather raised a hand to decline the Oscar statue being presented by Roger Moore. She held up an eight-page speech Brando had written for her, but she had been told by the show’s producer, Howard W Koch, that she would have only 60 seconds to speak, or else be arrested.
She calmly announced that Brando was “very regretful he could not accept this generous award” because of “the treatment of American Indians by the film industry, and on television in movie reruns, and also by recent happenings at Wounded Knee”. As she spoke, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux families by the Seventh Cavalry was being occupied by Native Americans, who had been protesting about the murder of a Lakota man. To a mix of applause and jeering, she apologised: “I hope I have not intruded on this evening and in the future our hearts will meet with love and understanding.”
According to the producers, the actor John Wayne, who was standing in the wings, had to be held back by security. Clint Eastwood, presenting the best picture award to The Godfather, quipped that he “didn’t know if I should present the award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in John Ford westerns over the years”.
In retrospect, the polite dignity with which Littlefeather, who has died aged 75, delivered her message, dressed in buckskin and with traditional hair-ties, made it more powerful. Indeed, Michael Caine, who hosted the awards programme, criticised Brando for “letting some poor little Indian girl take the boos” rather than doing it himself.
She was born Marie Louise Cruz, in Salinas, California, the daughter of Manuel Ybarra Cruz, whom she said was part Apache and part Yaqui, and Geroldine Barnit, of French, German and Dutch descent. They worked as saddlemakers and leather stampers. Marie took the name Sacheen Littlefeather after her father’s death.
At 23 she moved to San Francisco and began modelling while studying acting at California State University, Hayward, and landing some commercials. She joined the United Bay Indian Council, and became more active in Native American issues. In 1970, having been named “Miss Vampire USA” in a promotional film for a television show, House of Dark Shadows, she was involved in the occupation by Native Americans of Alcatraz Island. In 1972, she was photographed by Playboy magazine for a feature to be called Ten Little Indians, which was cancelled. But after she became famous for her Oscars intervention, Playboy ran the spread of her alone; she said she had been “young and dumb” when she posed nude, but now agreed to the publication because she needed the money to attend a theatre festival in France.
She had first made contact with Brando through the Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, her neighbour in San Francisco. She had sent Brando a letter; much later, when he called her at the radio station where she was working, he said: “I bet you don’t know who this is,” and she replied: “It sure as hell took you long enough to call. You beat ‘Indian time’ all to hell.” They became friends, and she was staying at his house on Mulholland Drive, intending to watch the Oscars, when Brando sat down and wrote his speech, then gave it to her to deliver, stipulating she not even touch the statuette.
She studied at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and had some small roles in films shot in the city, among them The Laughing Policeman (1973) and Freebie and the Bean (1974), and in the independent feature Winterhawk (1975) as Pale Flower. But she believed she had been blacklisted by Hollywood for her actions at the Oscars.
In September this year, the Academy hosted an “evening with Sacheen Littlefeather” and issued a formal apology for the “unwarranted and unjustified abuse she received”. “I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be hearing this,” she said. “It feels like the sacred circle is completing itself before I go in this life.” She had been undergoing treatment for cancer for some time.
Littlefeather is survived by two sisters, Trudy and Rozalind, who have disputed her account of their family heritage, saying their father was not the abusive parent Sacheen had portrayed, and was Mexican, without Native American blood. Trudy claimed: “Sacheen did not like herself. She didn’t like being Mexican. So it was better for her that way to play someone else.”
• Sacheen Littlefeather (Marie Louise Cruz), campaigner, born 14 November 1946; died 2 October 2022
