Marlon Brando won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in The Godfather on March 27, 1973. However, Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache and Yaqui actor and activist, took to the stage to refuse the award.
Sacheen Littlefeather wearing a buckskin dress and moccasins in her speech, explained that the reason Brando “very regretfully” could not accept the award was because of the “treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.”
The audience met the speech with mixed reactions as some clapped while others booed. Sacheen Littlefeather remained calm while shedding light on the fact that Brando’s rejection of the Oscar was also brought about by Native American activists’ occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which had begun many weeks before the award.
“I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening,” Sacheen Littlefeather ended the speech saying, “and that … in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity.” The speech didn’t just get boos, but threats too.
John Wayne, the Western film star that made troubling statements about Native Americans and Black Americans during his lifetime, had to be physically restrained by security guards because he tried to rush the stage while Littlefeather was speaking. Backstage, people shouted war cries and made racist gestures. A producer also threatened to have her arrested if she spent a second over a minute while giving her speech.
About 50 years after this speech, this act that has stood out as one of the most memorable in Oscar history, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally apologised to Sacheen Littlefeather.
When speaking to the Guardian’s Steve Rose last year, Sacheen Littlefeather said that the speech cost her her job as she was swiftly blacklisted in Hollywood: “I couldn’t get a job to save my life. I knew that J. Edgar Hoover had told people in the industry not to hire me.”
The Academy shared that David Rubin, its former president, sent the “statement of reconciliation” in June. Rubin wrote in the letter that “The abuse you endured … was unwarranted and unjustified. “The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your career in our industry are irreparable. For too long, the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”
The Academy has a “program of conversation, reflection, healing and celebration” in honour of Sacheen Littlefeather coming up on September 17 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
