How a letter to Brando led to Sacheen Littlefeather’s famous Oscar moment

It was a minute in the life of Sacheen Littlefeather that was literally seen around the world. A minute that would have an immeasurable impact on the young actor and activist’s life.

And it almost didn’t happen.

On March 27, 1973, the 26-year-old Apache/Yaqui woman took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles and turned down the Academy Award presented to Marlon Brando The Godfatherand then calmly explained to 85 million people that this was due to “the film industry’s treatment of American Indians today.”

Her words drew both cheers and boos. Littlefeather says the speech wasn’t just put together at the very last moment – she almost didn’t give it at all.

“We arrived about, oh, about 20 minutes before the end of the program,” Littlefeather said Unreservedly Host Rosanna Deerchild on the fateful Oscar show.

Besides, it wasn’t even the speech that Brando wanted Littlefeather to read.

CLOCK | The Oscar speech seen worldwide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUAcU0I4yU

Meeting Brando

The two had struck up a friendship about a year earlier, born out of his interest in indigenous rights. Littlefeather was working for a local radio station in San Francisco at the time and was head of the Affirmative Action Committee for the city’s Screen Actors Guild branch. They had a mutual friend — their neighbor, Francis Ford Coppola — and she convinced him to give their Brando’s address.

She wrote to him asking “if he was genuinely interested in Native Americans and their causes” or “because he was going to play the part of an Indian in a movie.”

She offered her views on how tribal peoples have been stereotyped in TV and film, essentially saying call me if you’d like to talk more about it.

A year passed.

“You would think at this point that the person would give up. But somehow I knew,” she said.

“There was a little spark inside that said, ‘No, I’ll hear from him one day. Well, one of those days happened.’

She got the call at work.

“I picked up the phone and this voice came out,” Littlefeather said. “And the voice said, ‘I bet you don’t know who that is.’ And I said, ‘Sure I do.’ He said, “Well, who is it?” And I said, ‘This is Marlon Brando.’”

She was right and says she told him, “It took you a hell of a long time to call! You’ve beaten Indian time!’”

Oscars would be ‘big’ but possibly ‘bad’

Littlefeather said they laughed like old friends and chatted for an hour, then continued talking regularly over the following weeks and months.

“It wasn’t about the film and it wasn’t about the industry itself. It was all about our common interest in the Native American stereotype.”

At the time, she was preparing reports for the US Federal Communications Commission about on-screen tribal peoples — how children were “misguided about who we really are.”

As she continued her work over the next year, the two continued their conversations.

“I’ve never spoken to anyone about talking to Marlon Brando. I kept that pretty well hidden,” she said.

And then came the fateful Oscar weekend. He called her on Saturday and asked her to represent him at the ceremony.

“And I said to him, ‘when is it?'” she laughed. “It seemed like a reasonable question to me.”

The ceremony, which took place on a Tuesday this year, took place just three days later. Brando told her it would be great, but that it could also be bad for her.

“I said if it would help Native Americans, yes, I would do anything.”

avoid arrest

But it wasn’t just a question of what she would say, but also what she would wear. She told him she had a pair of Levi’s and a top – or a traditional suede dress. That was it.

“So in a way you can say he chose my outfit.”

As for the speech, Littlefeather says Brando gave her about eight pages, which were hastily typed by his secretary just an hour before the Oscars ended.

“The only chance I had to read it was with a flashlight in the car.”

Brando had given Littlefeather and his secretary his two tickets to the ceremony; his nephew – dressed in a t-shirt and shorts – drove her to the venue.

Security was a bit skeptical.

They explained who they were, showed them the tickets – but the guards called show producer Howard Koch.

He confirmed Brando hadn’t turned up and agreed to let her in – even letting Littlefeather speak if Brando won. But he took one look at the eight pages in her hand and said no way.

“He said, ‘I’ll give you 60 seconds or less.’ If she went over, he told her, he would arrest her, handcuff her, and put her in jail.

“And he pointed out the cops there who would do just that.”

Because of this, what Littlefeather said at the end wasn’t written — something few people ever knew.

She heard the boos and “a kerfuffle” from offstage as an enraged John Wayne tried to stop her. “He had to be held down by six security guards,” Littlefeather said of the incident, which the show’s director Marty Pasetta similarly recalled years later.

Brando himself later told talk show host Dick Cavett that he was “worried” that she had been booed, although he believed the anger was directed at him.

“I was very glad that she had the opportunity to say what she did,” he said.

“I don’t think people in general realize what the film industry has done to American Indians…Native American children see Native Americans as wild, ugly, evil, vicious, treacherous, drunk. You just grow up with a negative image of yourself and it lasts a lifetime.”

CLOCK | Brando says Oscar audiences just didn’t want Littlefeather to be there:

Littlefeather had also mentioned the occupation of Wounded Knee, the American Indian Movement’s confrontation with US officials in South Dakota at the time. Elders of the Oglala Sioux tribe, dissatisfied with the local tribal government, had occupied the village where the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre took place. Members of the American Indian Movement came in to support and draw attention to federal and local government mistreatment of indigenous peoples. The FBI and US Marshals surrounded them for a 71-day standoff.

Littlefeather says she was rejected by the Hollywood establishment after her Oscars speech, but has no regrets.

“I wasn’t pushed out. I was pushed into it,” she said, explaining that while her acting life may have ended, she was able to pursue even more meaningful work.

“I knew that if you tell the truth, the truth will last through eternity,” she said. “I was ready for this because I knew my ancestors would be behind me and in front of me, surrounding me.”

Meeting with Mother Teresa

A few years later, she forged another meaningful friendship.

After working in Native American health care, she became one of the founding members of the American Indian AIDS Institute in San Francisco in the 1980s.

“We knew our people were dying of AIDS,” she said, and that people like her were the only ones who would help them.

And so she asked Mother Teresa, who was already helping to house and treat AIDS patients in the city, to teach her how.

Littlefeather became her student, attended Mass with her, and marveled at the amount of positive energy in her small, gnarled body.

“She made me laugh the whole time,” she said.

Littlefeather is still a healer today at the age of 75, and on September 17, almost 50 years after that Oscar moment, she will be recognized by the Academy Museum a whole evening to celebrate and a reading of the formal apology she received last month.

“And the answer I’m going to give is on behalf of the indigenous people. Not just for me,” Littlefeather said.

“Because we have been owed that apology for many, many years and that is the premise on which I accept.”

---

Interview produced by Kim Kaschor.