Three weeks after the death of Sacheen Littlefeather, the famous activist who accepted Marlon Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather at the 1973 Academy Awards, a new column claims Littlefeather was pretending to be a Native American during her lifetime.
Posted Saturday in San Francisco Chroniclethe piece contains quotes from Littlefeather’s sisters, Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi, who have called the activist’s identity as a Native American a “lie.”
Littlefeather, who died October 2 of breast cancer at the age of 75, first claimed publicly that she belonged to the White Mountain Apache, a tribe in Arizona, in the 1970s. According to the column, no tribal official was able to provide records for Little Feather or her registered family members. Littlefeather also announced her Yaqui descent in later years. The Yaqui people come from Arizona and from the Mexican state of Sonora.
Littlefeather was born in Salinas, Arizona as Maria Luis Cruz to Manuel Ybarra Cruz and Gertrude Barnitz. The columnist’s review of her father’s ancestry, in which Littlefeather claimed her native heritage, found no links with Native American nations in Littlefeather’s heritage in the United States allegedly traced to areas now part of Mexico.
“It’s a lie,” Orlandi told the Chronicle. “My father was the same. His family came from Mexico. And my father was born in Oxnard.”
“It’s a scam,” Cruz said. It is disgusting for the heritage of the tribes. And that’s just… an insult to my father.”
The Little Feather sisters also disputed the activist’s allegations of a poor background and “mentally ill” parents. The two sisters first learned of Littlefeather’s death online; Neither of them was invited to the funeral.
Notably, several Native American writers and activists have decried the Chronicle column on social media, saying that its writer, Jacqueline Keeler, has long practiced a vendetta against Littlefeather, among other characters she calls “Pretendians.” They also say that the Littlefeather sisters thought they were of Native American descent until Wheeler told them they weren’t. “Her desire to get rid of the protesters led to a violent retaliation against the genuine reconnection of indigenous peoples who did not meet colonial standards,” CarlyMButton Books on Twitter.
Keeler and representatives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were not immediately available for comment.
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