Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American actress who famously declined Marlon Brandon’s best actor Oscar in 1973, has died. She was 75.
Information of Littlefeather’s death was shared by the official Twitter account for the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences.
Her household confirmed in an announcement to USA TODAY that Littlefeather died Sunday “peacefully at residence” in Marin County, California, “surrounded by family members.”
Littlefeather, who was Apache and Yaqui, was born Marie Louise Cruz on Nov. 14, 1946, in Salinas, California. The actress, a graduate of California State College in Hayward who studied performing on the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, appeared in movies akin to 1973’s “Counselor at Crime,” 1974’s “The Trial of Billy Jack” and 1975’s “Johnny Firecloud.”
She went on to co-found the Nationwide American Indian Performing Arts Registry.
‘By no means thought I might reside to see the day’:Oscars apologize to Sacheen Littlefeather for mocked speech
In 2018, Littlefeather revealed she was battling Stage 4 breast cancer.
Her demise got here weeks after she obtained a long-overdue apology from the Academy Awards. Almost 50 years in the past, the actress and activist rejected an Oscar on behalf of “The Godfather” star Brando, who boycotted the ceremony to protest Hollywood’s negative portrayals of Native Americans. Littlefeather delivered a speech on his behalf, which was roundly mocked and booed by many members of the viewers.
On Sept. 17, Littleweather was honored in “An Night With Sacheen Littlefeather,” billed as a program of “dialog, reflection, therapeutic and celebration” at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. However Littlefeather had obtained a non-public apology from the Academy months prior in June.
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“The emotional burden you’ve got lived by and the associated fee to your individual profession in our trade are irreparable. For too lengthy the braveness you confirmed has been unacknowledged,” learn a letter of apology, signed by the Academy’s then-president, David Rubin. “For this, we provide each our deepest apologies and our honest admiration.”
Littlefeather advised The Hollywood Reporter in August that she was “stunned” to obtain a proper apology.
“I by no means thought I’d reside to see the day I’d be listening to this, experiencing this,” Littlefeather mentioned. “After I was on the podium in 1973, I stood there alone.”
However as Hollywood nonetheless struggles to make significant strides for Indigenous illustration, some members of the Native American neighborhood discovered the public apology to Littlefeather the naked minimal.
“Truthfully, it has been 50 years,” Eric Buffalohead, chair of the American Indian, First Nations and Indigenous Research division at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, advised USA TODAY after the Academy occasion. “(It) positively feels too little too late.”
He added, “Hollywood has spent over 100 years portraying American Indians as part of the previous, caught without end in 18th- and Nineteenth-century settings. The fantasy of American Indians has changed the truth of American Indians in individuals’s minds.”
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Littlefeather turned the primary Native American girl to talk on stage on the Oscars. Sporting a buckskin gown and moccasins, she delivered a 60-second speech explaining that Brando couldn’t settle for the award due to “the therapy of American Indians immediately by the movie trade.”
The 1973 Oscars had been held throughout the American Indian Movement’s two-month occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which Brando referenced within the speech she delivered.
As she exited the Oscars stage after the speech, “I used to be met with the stereotypical tomahawk chop, people who known as at me, and I ignored all of them,” she advised Selection lately. “I continued to stroll straight forward with a few armed guards beside me, and I held my head high and was proud to be the primary Indigenous girl within the historical past of the Academy Awards to make that political assertion.”
Within the years since, Littlefeather mentioned she had been discriminated towards and personally attacked for her transient look. On Sunday, the Academy shared a quote from the civil rights activist that learn: “When I’m gone, all the time be reminded that everytime you stand on your reality, you may be protecting my voice and the voices of our nations and our individuals alive.”
Her household requested that donations be made to the American Indian Child Resource Center of Oakland, California.
Contributing: Jake Coyle, The Related Press, and Kim Willis, USA TODAY
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