Sacheen Littlefeather 40 years after one of the most memorable moments in the history of the Academy Awards. Marlon Brando was awarded the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The Godfather in 1973; he sent an unknown 26-year-old Native American activist and aspiring actress named Sacheen Littlefeather up to the stage to refuse the statuette on his behalf. As the stunned audience Littlefeather explained that Brando was regretfully turning down the award to protest “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry” and the ongoing siege of 200 American Indian Movement activists by armed authorities in Wounded Knee, S.D. She concluded before leaving the stage, “and that we will, in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity.” The impact that one-minute on the Oscar stage in front of 85 million people had on the rest of her life. An all-out campaign to discredit and blacklist her, Littlefeather soon abandoned any ambitions she’d had of an acting career and dropped almost entirely out of the public eye. Still, her Oscar notoriety never fully faded. “It goes back to the time of the Romans: If you didn’t like the message, you kill the messenger.” She says. But while she may have paid a price for being the messenger for Brando’s Oscar protest, Littlefeather has moved on. For the past four decades, she has worked to provide health-care education and advocacy in the Native American community, ministered to AIDS patients with Mother Teresa in the 1980s, and led a prayer circle devoted to the first Native American Catholic saint, Kateri Tekakwitha. She betrays no regrets about anything. “I promised myself a long time ago that I would lead an interesting life,” she says. “And that’s what I’ve done, Marlon Brando or no Marlon Brando…. I’m an elder now, coming to the end of my road. Now I am in a place of being a healer, if you will, of my own journey.”
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 00:58:52 +0000
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