Oscars other scandal: The Academy really doesn’t want to talk about Sacheen Littlefeather

As the Oscars approach Sunday night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed it had created “a crisis team” that it hopes will prevent another fiasco like last year when Will Smith rushed on stage and slapped Chris Rock in front of a live global TV audience.

However, the Academy has refused to address another ongoing controversy: The potent ethnic fraud allegations against Sacheen Littlefeather, which have raised questions about the organization’s commitment to historical accuracy in its glittery new  Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

The late Bay Area activist has been accused by her own sisters and others of spending much of her life lying about being Native American, notably when she stood on the Oscars stage in 1973 in a buckskin dress at the behest of Marlon Brando. Littlefeather made Oscars history by identifying herself as Apache and refusing Brando’s best actor trophy for “The Godfather” to protest the negative stereotyping of Indians in entertainment and to call attention to the occupation protest in Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

RELATED: The strange, sad tale of Sacheen Littlefeather: Did icon fake a Native American identity?

Littlefeather’s sisters, Trudy Orlandi and Rosalind Cruz, and some Native American scholars and activists say this important moment should come with an asterisk. They allege that Littlefeather is America’s latest high-profile “Pretendian,” a person who falsely claims to be Native for fame, money or other opportunities. The sisters came forward with their allegations after Littlefeather’s Oct. 2 death from cancer and after the Academy Museum hosted a gala event in September to honor her as the “first Native woman” to stand on the Oscars stage. The Academy reaped positive PR when it also apologized to the former actor for the boos she faced during her speech and the discrimination she says she endured in Hollywood years after.

The Academy continues to identify Littlefeather as a White Mountain Apache and Yaqui on its website and to showcase her 60-second speech in a museum gallery presenting top moments in Oscars history. Orlandi said she has received no response to a letter she wrote to the Academy last month, asking it to remove the tribute to her sister. Meanwhile, historians and activists told this news organization that the allegations should at least prompt the Academy to investigate and determine whether it should amend its presentation of Littlefeather in its gallery spaces or in podcast and video interviews posted on its official channels. Some also wonder if the Academy will honor Littlefeather again Sunday night by featuring her in its annual In Memoriam segment.

Both sisters say Littlefeather’s speech was the first time anyone in their Salinas family had ever talked about being Native American. “It was a moving presentation, but it was a pretend Sacheen,” said Orlandi, who lives in Marin County “And White Mountain Apache? Where did that come from?”

To Littlefeather’s sisters, she was an attention-seeking fabulist. In interviews over the years, including in a three-hour “oral history” with Academy Museum president Jacqueline Stewart, the former Marin County resident told stories about herself that either can’t be verified or are refuted by other people and historical records. Orlandi and Cruz take particular issue with how Littlefeather described an impoverished childhood. She also never mentioned having sisters as she regularly claimed her father was an alcoholic, self-hating Indian who beat her and that both parents were too mentally ill to raise her — deploying what they say are familiar Native American stereotypes of abuse, alcoholism and abandonment.

In reality, Orlandi and Cruz say Littlefeather was born Marie Louise Cruz to Manuel and Geroldine Cruz, a Mexican American father and a White mother, who raised their three daughters in a loving, middle class home. An investigation into their father’s Mexican ancestry by Native American journalist Jacqueline Keeler, going back to 1850, uncovered no ties between the Cruz family of Mexico and the White Mountain Apache or Yaqui tribes. Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a writer and lecturer on  American Indian Studies at Cal State San Marcos, who once was commissioned to ghost-write Littlefeather’s memoir until Littlefeather backed out of the project, told this news organization that the former actor never talked her about family connections to the White Mountain Apache or Yaqui tribes. That’s one of the reasons she came to suspect that Littlefeather perpetrated a hoax.

In an email to this news organization, the Academy refused to answer multiple questions, including whether it tried to verify Littlefeather’s claims of tribal affiliation and if and how it vetted other statements she made about her family and her activism, including whether she participated in the 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz or was targeted by the FBI for blacklisting from Hollywood jobs. It also refused to say whether it received the letter from Orlandi, why it decided to honor her in the first place and how it chooses people to be featured in its In Memoriam segment.

RELATED: Sacheen Littlefeather’s ‘work’ on famed San Francisco ballet among suspect claims

The organizers of Littlefeather’s celebration — Stewart, a University of Chicago film historian and popular host for Turner Classic Movies, and film producers Bird Runningwater and Heather Rae, members of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance — also did not respond to email requests for comment.

“We do not have additional information to share, neither on background nor on the record, beyond what we provided for your previous story,” Stephanie Sykes, the museum’s director of communications. The only apparent concession the Academy has made to the controversy is that it posted a disclaimer at the start of Stewart’s interview with her, saying oral histories “should not be understood as statements of fact.”

The Academy previously said it recognizes “self-identification.” But is “self-identification” sufficient when it involves a controversial figure like Littlefeather? The museum didn’t want to answer that question either. This lack of response has disappointed scholars who say the Academy Museum, as a cultural institution, has a position of public trust and should want to get its facts straight about a person featured in one of its exhibits.

“I believe the real question for the Academy Museum is, how would they have reacted if a performer had falsified their Black American heritage? Surely the NAACP would have put enormous pressure on them to cancel any exhibit honoring the artist,” said historian Angela Aleiss, the co-author of “Hollywood’s Native Americans.” Aleiss is known as the writer who exposed the Iron Eyes Cody scandal in the 1990s. Cody was a second-generation Italian American actor who falsely claimed to be Native American after playing one in movies, TV and the “Keep America Beautiful” public service ads in the early 1970s,

Liza Black, an associate professor at Native American and Indigenous studies at Indiana University, said neither the Academy Museum nor Littlefeather’s supporters have come up with new information or an argument — aside from self-identification — to justify why the public should believe she was who she said she was.

Instead the Academy chooses to “parade” Littlefeather to its supporters to prove it cares about diversity, Black said. When she visited the museum in late 2021, Black was disappointed that the museum didn’t say much else about Native Americans in Hollywood. Black remembers seeing only a few displays about Native Americans, even though Westerns, starring everyone from John Wayne to “singing cowboy” Gene Autry, were long the industry’s bread and butter. Black said she mostly remembered seeing Littlefeather’s speech playing on a loop video, near a video of Sidney Poitier becoming the first person of color person to win a top acting prize.

“Isn’t it incredible? They’re still cashing in on her,” said Black, the author of “Picturing Indians,” an academic book on Native Americans in the film industry. “We’re talking about a woman, who may not be Native American, who may have knowingly lied about who she is and who only came to their attention because a White man wanted to bring attention to contemporary Native issues and historic misrepresentation.”

Going by Littlefeather’s word also may conflict with museum best practices, as outlined by the American Historical Association and the Alliance for American Museums. They say exhibits should be “grounded in scholarship” and “marked by intellectual integrity.” When controversy arises, an exhibit should acknowledge “competing points of view” and let the public see that “history is a changing process of interpretation and reinterpretation.”

Stephen Aron, president and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West, and a former chair of the UCLA history department, said museums have grappled in recent years with new information and evolving cultural awareness that casts collections in a new light.

“Museums have an obligation to try to put the record straight, when the record has been straightened,” said Aron. While not commenting on the Littlefeather controversy directly, Aron said his museum would investigate if presented with credible allegations that an exhibit contained factual errors or failed to include relevant perspectives. “I would expect we would correct it. If we found it was contested and conflicted, I hope we would find a way to call attention to that, to show that things aren’t always so black and white.”

Correcting an exhibit doesn’t mean scrapping it, Aron said. Sometimes a museum can simply post a sign next to a display that addresses a related controversy. He recalled how the Smithsonian posted signs acknowledging the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby in exhibitions related to the entertainer’s career and featuring works from his private art collection.

Scholars also said the Littlefeather issue presents the Academy with a unique opportunity to help the public understand the complicated reality of Native American identity and the Indian experience in Hollywood.

Scholars say Native identity encompasses more than race and ethnicity. It involves a political affiliation with a tribe in the United States and each tribe’s requirements for enrollment, which can ask potential members to prove family connections to a registered member or to show a “blood quantum,” a minimum amount of “Indian blood.” Not everyone who seeks tribal kinship can meet these requirements, which is why Littlefeather defenders say “self-identification” should suffice, especially since she spent her adult life embracing Native American culture and causes.

But Keeler said Littlefeather’s embrace of Native culture isn’t enough, because, as an example, someone who loves French culture or who claims a distant French ancestry doesn’t “get to claim French citizenship” or act as a spokesperson for French people. Keeler also said there wouldn’t be a problem with Littlefeather winning accolades for her activism if she had been honest about being an “ally” instead of appropriating an entire identity.

Anton Treuer, professor of Ojibwe history and language at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, said a “delicate balance” needs to be struck. While too much calling out hurts “our ability to call people in and rebuild community,” Pretendians do “real harm” by seizing “air time that should be reserved for authentic Native voices.”

That’s the point made by Black, who said that the Academy Museum is letting Littlefeather “fill in the Native space in its glorious museum” that could go to more worthy subjects. She said the museum also could use Littlefeather as a case study for how Native American representation is fraught in Hollywood, an industry of shifting identities. “It can be really easy in Hollywood to have this kind of thing snowball on you,” Black said. “They can (claim to be Indian) once, and suddenly that’s how they’re identified and it’s getting them work, so they keep up with it.”