Recently, it has become fashionable to revive the reputations in the name of feminism of dumb bimbos like Britney Spears and Sacheen Littlefeather. From NPR a few weeks ago:
Sacheen Littlefeather sacrificed her career to make way for Indigenous voices
October 7, 2022 5:06 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
KELLY MOFFITTZANNA MCKAY
Actor and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, best known for declining Marlon Brando’s 1973 Oscar to protest Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans, has died at the age of 75.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Time now for StoryCorps. Today, we remember actor and activist Sacheen Littlefeather. In 1973, she used what should have been Marlon Brando’s Oscar acceptance speech to call out the treatment of Native American people and their depiction in Hollywood. Littlefeather died this week at the age of 75. She came to StoryCorps in 2019, after she’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER: I was born into poverty. And my parents’ marriage was illegal because my father was an Apache and Yaqui man. And my mother was white. I was raised by my two white grandparents, so there was hardly anybody that I could identify with. There were white dolls, white movie stars. People in magazines were all white. So I learned and experienced racial prejudice from a very early age. I didn’t even have to walk out my front door. When I got to university, at long last – thank God – there were other Native people out there. We used to go to powwows together. And then I began to listen to the stories of the elders there. I thought then, this is who I really am. So I springboarded (ph) into the arts. And then, eventually, I met Marlon Brando. When I first got the phone call from him, I said, you’re asking me to do what, use the Academy Award as a platform to make a political speech? Nothing had been done like that ever before.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LITTLEFEATHER: The winner is Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.”
(APPLAUSE)
LITTLEFEATHER: The night of the awards ceremony, I had a sense of calm. I knew my ancestors were with me. I said what needed to be said. I refused the Academy Award.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LITTLEFEATHER: And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.
(JEERING, APPLAUSE)
LITTLEFEATHER: And then I became unhirable (ph), boycotted, talked about, humiliated publicly. But as a result, I opened the doors for other people to speak. These are the things that I learned from the elders. You have to go through a lot of bumps in this life to smooth the road for others to come after you.
FADEL: That was Sacheen Littlefeather for StoryCorps in 2019. In August, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issued an apology to Littlefeather. It came nearly 50 years after she was booed at the Oscars.
From the Daily Mail over the weekend:
‘It is a fraud’: Sisters of Sacheen Littlefeather reveal she was NOT Native American and her biological father was Mexican – activist famously took the stage to decline Marlon Brando’s Oscar in 1973, claiming Apache heritage
In 1973, Sacheen Littlefeather – claiming to be a member of the Apache Nation, delivered a speech on Marlon Brando’s behalf at the Academy Awards
The actress and activist, who died earlier this month, spent her lifetime lying about her heritage, which her sisters say is Mexican
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle says Littlefeather had no Native American relations and began calling herself native sometime in the late 1960s
Prior to her death, The Academy formally apologized to Littlefeather – she accepted at an event in person, to which she wore traditional Native clothing
By SOPHIE MANN FOR DAILYMAIL.COMPUBLISHED: 16:20 EDT, 22 October 2022 | UPDATED: 06:57 EDT, 23 October 2022
Native American actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who died earlier this month at the age of 75, has been exposed as an ethnic fraud by her two Hispanic sisters.
The model-turned-activist gained instant notoriety in 1973, when she took the stage at the Academy Awards in place of Marlon Brando. The actor, who had won the best actor statue for his role in ‘The Godfather,’ allowed Littlefeather to speak in his stead about the way Native Americans were treated in Hollywood.
Claiming to be a descendent of the Apache nation, Littlefeather spoke about the way Native American’s plight in Hollywood. The audience booed her, and she faced racist backlash for years.
Nearly 50 years after that moment on stage, Sacheen was issued a letter of apology by The Academy and agreed to appear at an in-person event to formally accept the apology in mid-September.
The only problem with Littlefeather’s heretofore unquestioned life story was that not an ounce of it was true, according to her siblings.
In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Littlefeather’s two biological sisters – Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi – pull the curtains back on their sibling’s half-century long fraud.
In March of 1973, Sacheen Littlefeather, posing as a Native American delivered a speech about the way ‘her people’ were treated in Hollywood in lieu of Marlon Brando accepting his best actor award
‘It’s a lie,’ Orlandi told the outlet. ‘My father was who he was. His family came from Mexico. And my dad was born in Oxnard.’
Cruz concurred, ‘It is a fraud.
‘It’s disgusting to the heritage of the tribal people. And it’s just… insulting to my parents.’
Orlandi speculated that at the time Littlefeather entered the world of entertainment she decided ‘it was more prestigious to be an American Indian than it was to be a Hispanic’ – her true ethnicity.
Shortly before her death, Littlefeather also spoke to the Chronicle about her famed Oscars speech:
‘I spoke my heart, not for me, myself, as an Indian woman but for we and us, for all Indian people…I had to speak the truth. Whether or not it was accepted, it had to be spoken on behalf of Native people,’ she said.
In reality, Littlefeather was born in Salinas, California under the name Maria Louise Cruz.
Her parents were Manuel Ybarra Cruz and Gertrude Barnitz.
A review of her father’s genealogy produced no evidence that his extended family had any relation to Native American nations in the US.
These days, however, it would probably be less fashionable to be an American Indian than an immigrant Amerindian.
Marlon Brando was a good-hearted true believer in Diversity. Hence he damn near ruined his career by going on Larry King and suggesting that Jewish Hollywood moguls who had done so much for blacks in the 1950s and 1960s should do the same for Indians and Hispanics in the 1990s:
