Infamous Sacheen Littlefeather has become a historically notorious figure due to her 1973 stint as Marlon Brando’s Academy Awards stand-in. At the awards, she denounced the film industry for its representation of Native Americans. Sacheen’s real name was Marie Louise Cruz, and she died on October 2.
Cruz claimed throughout her life that she was of Apache descent, if not full-blooded. However, her sisters indicated that Cruz was instead of Hispanic and European heritage and a “fraud.”
The claim to fame for Sacheen Littlefeather was refusing the Oscar for Best Actor on behalf of Brando, who didn’t attend the Hollywood ceremony.
“My name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I’m Apache, and I am the president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee,” Cruz said as she stood at the podium in a traditional Native American costume.
At the time Cruz said Brando refused the award because of “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry … and on television in movie re-runs, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”
Her hinting to Wounded Knee was in reference to the 1973 Incident at Wounded Knee, South Dakota when armed followers of the American Indian Movement occupied the area for 71 days. They shot and paralyzed U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm and wounded an FBI agent. The whole situation was still going on during the 1973 Oscars ceremony.
At the next award announcement, Clint Eastwood quipped, “I don’t know if I should present this award … on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford westerns over the years.”
The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman described Cruz as “was poised and courageous, and the mockery she endured was flagrantly sexist and racist.”
Cruz later claimed that she had been “silenced” after her appearance and struggled to find work.
In true woke culture the Academy held a “reconciliation” event for Cruz at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures earlier this year.
However, according to her sisters, Cruz was the daughter of a Spanish-American and a woman of European descent.
The Guardian reported last year that her father “was Native American, a mix of Apache and Yaqui, and her mother was white.” The outlet had taken Cruz at her word and did not fact-check.
Cruz’s sister, Rozalind Cruz, tweeted that she would entertain the possibility that their father might have been of “Yaqui and Spanish” descent, on Oct. 4. She went so far as to try enrolling in the White Mountain Apache Tribe.
The New York Times has now reported, after nearly one month after printing Cruz’s obituary calling her an “Apache activist,” that Jacqueline Keeler, a member of the Navajo Nation, produced genealogical research for Rozalind Cruz that placed her application status in doubt.
Keeler’s research traced the family of Cruz’s father back to Mexico in 1850. There was no evidence of him being a Native American or having any Native ancestry.
Another Cruz sister, Orlandi Cruz, told the San Francisco Chronicle that her sister Marie’s claim of Apache heritage is “a lie … My father was who he was. His family came from Mexico. And my dad was born in Oxnard.”
Rozalind Cruz concurred: “It is a fraud … It’s disgusting to the heritage of the tribal people. And it’s just … insulting to my parents.”
Both sisters identify as “Spanish,” suggesting their deceased sister alternatively sought to be an “American Indian princess. It was more prestigious to be an American Indian than it was to be Hispanic in her mind.”
