A Recent TV Slur Revives Debate About Sacheen Littlefeather and Her Role in Marlon Brando's Oscar Refusal

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: November 24, 2012
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"A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Littlefeather is a highly respected member of the Native American community. She has served as head woman dancer at many pow wows and is known for her work in health-care education in the Native community. In the 1980s she worked with Mother Teresa ministering to AIDS patients in hospice care, leading to her becoming one of the founding board members of the American Indian AIDS Institute of San Francisco. In 1981 she worked for the Kiowa tribe in Oklahoma and wrote a health-related column in the tribal newspaper. She has helped produce numerous Native American films, even sharing an Emmy Award in 1984 for her contribution to PBS’s Dance in America: A Song for Dead Warriors, which featured a ballet based on the life of Richard Oakes, one of the Alcatraz occupation leaders. She is also a co-coordinator of the Kateri Prayer Circle of San Francisco."

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Littlefeather is a woman with an incredible amount of determination and strength to do what she did in the 1970s. I personally don't think that many women, especially a Native woman, would of had the strength to stand up in front of everyone and declare that Brando could not accept the very generous award because of the treatment of American Indians by the film industry and on television and because of “recent happenings at Wounded Knee." I find it rather impressive that a famous individual is actually paying attention to what is happening to the Native populations in the 1970s, enough so that he was willing to not accept his award, but instead sends up a Native woman. I don't know if I would consider this a cop out on his part? Is it weak that he didn't make the speech against what was happening himself or was he being attention the issue further by having a Native woman deliver the speech. He probably thought it was a better idea to have a Native woman deliver the speech than to have himself do it. It would be considered an attention grabber play, but it didn't work out the way he planned it would. It back fired completely. It destroyed her life. She was black listed from the film industry and had terrible racist articles written about her. The latest racist comment happened only a few months ago on the Jay Leno show. He said that she was not Native and called her a "stripper," because of a photoshoot that happened in Playboy.
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The fact that she had to defend herself so strongly back then and still so strongly now shows that the opinion of Native people and especially woman haven't changed a whole lot. The article had to give an extreme amount of background (present in the above quote) to prove that she is a very active and important part of the environment. They had to defend her rights to be a Native American and prove that she was important and had something to prove. I find that the most depressing part, that a woman who has done so much for a community can be so easily destroyed by one action and never recover from it. She will never get back her power that she once held before the award show. I feel as thought it is partly Brando's fault for placing her in the situation, but she also took part in it. I don't think either part thought about how it would impact their lives forever.