“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.”
1177: Sacheen Littlefeather
Actress and Activist for Native American Civil Rights
Born: 15 November 1946, Salinas, California, United States of America
Died: 2 October 2022, Novato, California, United States of America
Original Name: Maria Louise Cruz
Sacheen is most remembered for giving a speech for actor Marlon Brando at the 45th Academy Awards in 1973. At the time of the awards, Native American activists were protesting across the country for their civil rights. Marlon Brando wanted to support that message, and so he allowed Sacheen to give a speech during what should have been his acceptance speech time slot. Sacheen, who claimed to be of Apache heritage, spoke about the mistreatment of Native Americans in the film industry and beyond (and formally refused to accept the Oscar on Marlon’s behalf). At the time, Sacheen was hailed as the first Native American woman to stand onstage at the Oscars. She was booed loudly, and according to some sources, actors such as John Wayne wanted to forcibly remove her from the stage (though this claim has never definitively been proven).
Sacheen claimed later in life that the stunt ensured she was blacklisted from Hollywood, meaning she had little to no jobs offered her. Nearly fifty years after the stunt, Sacheen received an official apology from the Academy just weeks before her death from breast cancer.
Sacheen claimed that, as a child, she and her white mother were abused by her father, who was of White Mountain Apache and Yaqui background. Sacheen also stated she grew up in a small shack in abject poverty.
After Sacheen passed away, her sisters stepped forward with a ground-breaking claim. According to her sisters, Sacheen actually had ZERO Native American ancestry and was actually Hispanic. Sacheen’s sisters, Rosalind and Trudy, stated their father had Mexican heritage and had been born in Oxnard, California. Rosalind was quoted as stating, “It is a fraud…It’s disgusting to the heritage of the tribal people. And it’s just … insulting to my parents.” Rosalind and Trudy continue to maintain their family has no tribal ties or Native American heritage whatsoever. Trudy added, “I mean, you’re not gonna be a Mexican American princess. You’re gonna be an American Indian princess. It was more prestigious to be an American Indian than it was to be Hispanic in her mind.”
The claims go beyond Sacheen’s sisters, however. Other researchers, including the author of the San Francisco Chronicle article linked below, have looked into Sacheen’s family tree and have found no Native American heritage whatsoever. Sacheen’s father was named Manuel Ybarra Cruz. Not only that, but Sacheen claimed to have been descended from the White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona. This tribe is federally recognized, and in order to become a recognized member of the tribe you have to undergo “official enrollment policies” (according to the Chronicle author), which Sacheen never did. The White Mountain Tribe is also noted for their isolationist policies in regard to Spanish heritage, so it is even more odd for Sacheen’s father’s family to be both Hispanic AND White Mountain Apache.
The Yaqui tribe does have ties to Mexico, however. Unfortunately for Sacheen, researchers were once again unable to find any link between her family and the Yaqui tribe, despite being able to trace genealogical records in Mexico back to the 1850s. Sacheen’s family, the Cruzes, come from a village that is now a part of Mexico City, and not near Yaqui territory. No one from Sacheen’s direct family tree ever lived near the Yaqui or White Mountain Apache people’s tribal lands. Some of the farther reaches of Sacheen’s family tree did live near Pima/O’odham territory in Sonora, but again, these relations were not actually members of those tribes, nor are they direct relations to Sacheen and would not have given her a right to claim heritage of those peoples either.
The Chronicle article continues even more damningly by stating:
“All of the family’s cousins, great-aunts, uncles and grandparents going back to about 1880 (when their direct ancestors crossed the border from Mexico) identified as white, Caucasian and Mexican on key legal documents in the United States. None of their relatives married anyone who identified as Native American or American Indian. All of their spouses also identified as either white, Caucasian or Mexican. White Mountain Apache tribal officials I spoke with told me they found no record of either Littlefeather or her family members, living or dead, being enrolled in the White Mountain Apache.”
Sacheen first began to claim Native American ancestry in the late 1960s/early 1970s as a student at San Jose University.
Trudy and Rosalind themselves checked with the White Mountain Apache to see if their family had ties to the tribe and also came up empty. The sisters also were very firm and agreed that Sacheen’s claims of being abused as a child were completely false. In fact, their father was actually deaf from the age of nine and lived in and out of foster care homes. Before that, Sacheen’s father had been abused by an alcoholic father.
Trudy and Rosalind have maintained that Sacheen took the abuse their own father suffered and applied it to her own life even though it was completely false. A quote from Sacheen dating to 1974 describes how her family lived in a shack and got a toilet after she was born. Trudy and Rosalind have photos of the home Sacheen described as a shack, and in their description, it is anything but (and by the way, the house had a toilet when they moved in!).
Sacheen also claimed she was taken away from her abusive parents and placed with her white grandparents at the age of three for her own safety. According to Sacheen’s sisters, their grandparents were their next-door neighbors. When the three sisters were little, they made their own clothes as members of 4-H. The ribbon they used to make their clothes? The Sacheen Ribbon Co. Trudy and Rosalind believe this is where their sister adopted her “Indian name” from. Rosalind and Trudy always called her “Deb” when they were children.
Sacheen herself claimed she received the name from a Navajo activist after they took control of Alcatraz Island for a time in 1969. The actress and activist claimed her name meant “Little Bear” in the Navajo language…except that the actual words for “Little Bear” are “shush yazh,” and Navajo people rarely name humans after animals. And if that isn’t bad enough, Sacheen was actually not present on Alcatraz at all during the eighteen-month occupation, as attested to by LaNada Warjack, a Shoshone-activist who was present during the entire occupation.
Another way to know Sacheen was not actually Native? She did a Playboy spread in the 1970s, a time in which no Native woman wanted to be portrayed as a sex object, according to LaNada Warjack. The Native American community, for the most part, had never even heard of Sacheen until the night of the Academy Awards.
Trudy and Rosalind learned their sister had died from online news articles. Neither were initially invited to the funeral. They claim they never spoke out during their sister’s life because they had hoped her fame would eventually dissipate and it wouldn’t be a big deal, but after Sacheen died and the internet began to revere her as being almost-saint-like, they couldn’t stand for it any longer.
Arguably the worst part of the entire story is that, almost a year after Sacheen’s death, her New York Times obituary still perpetuates the lies Sacheen told about her life—that her father was White Mountain Apache, that she took place at the Alcatraz Occupation, etc.
Sacheen Littlefeather had good intentions in terms of her activism work, that much is true. But she dishonored herself and Native American people by claiming to be something she was not. Her name was Maria Cruz, and she was not Apache, Yaqui, or O'odham. She was an American girl with Hispanic heritage, and for some reason that simply was not good enough for her. That simple truth is arguably the saddest part of the entire story.
Badges Earned:
Find a Grave Marked
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/movies/sacheen-littlefeather-dead.html
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/244099064/sacheen-littlefeather