The weird thing about this story to me is that it was something I read about many years ago and I thought was general knowledge. When the Motion Picture Academy apologized to her I thought perhaps what I knew about it was wrong. Now this.
I’m not sure I can bring myself to care about it. She actually cared and worked for Native American rights. If she wasn’t actually Native American I don’t see how this “truth” negates that.
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I was unaware of this fact until just a few years ago. And I thought we were lucky Confederate statue lovers didn’t erect a statue of Standing Waite, the last Confederate General to surrender in the Civil war. He was a Cherokee Chief and slaveholder. They could have done that just to troll us Libs 
I don’t want to dig into the family dispute between Littlefeather and her sisters. But I do wonder why a journalist waited until a week or so after she died to come forward.
From Keeler’s story, it seems clear that she did not interview Littlefeather before her death. Why not, if she was interested in the truth Whitaker says we should prefer?
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Wonderful – and for some of us very talented musicians, music (and life) comes so easy! 
It’ s strange that my absolute fave movies of Brando were not very popular – The Fugitive Kind and Burn (or ¡Queimada!). I relate to the Fugitive Kind, But I dream of ¡Queimada! and the struggle and music.
Thank you for this wonderful post! I still go back to many of these great artists for their work and inspiration – when I was a musician in the mid 1960s and now, in reflection, advocacy/activism and admiration in my life. I went to the protest in Washington, D.C., for the Trail of Broken Treaties, when I was 20, in 1972. And, then again, the next year, to the Dakotas, for the occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Since 2016 I have been an active supporter for the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, but am just too old to go there in the winter anymore.
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Me too…
Please give this woman a break. Her personal and medical history is very complex, and I just cannot accept that she was a fraud.
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My fathers father was raised in a catholic orphanage from an infant, both his parents dying about 1917-18, and ya pre coved by many years I assumed it was the so called Spanish Flu.
Shortly after wwII my grandfathers wife came into some money and my grandfather started a couple milk dairies in los Angles and did fairly well, but not as well as he did when he sold the property becoming a millionaire.
My grandfather had mentioned a few times way back then about being Paiute from around Palm Springs, a southwest Native American group that covers a good part of eastern California and eastern connected states.
About the time his many children were struggling to get their children into collage etc they approached Mosses, damn the Catholics had a sense of humor, and asked him if he would register. He would not. My aunts and uncles did some research and discovered the orphanage he grew up in had burned down in the early ‘30s so all records were destroyed.
Mosses is in the first john Wayne film as a bare back riding ‘Indian’ extra.
Mosses basically told his children that he had worked hard to make his way, and he always did right up to the last weeks of his life in his mid eighties. He told them to go out and find your way, that handouts were evil, and refused from that point on to discuss his heritage, not that he hardly ever had.
Ironically he lost all his wealth opening a bunch of small groceries not understanding were or how the new freeways were going to effect things. Started a few more dairy farms, milked the cows two times a day every day and wouldn’t you know it, damn if the property didn’t increase in value so that selling once again he would have a fat seven figures in the bank back when that was something.
Many years after Mosses passed some of our family did some digging around but found little to go on. I tell people that I am 25% Paiute, I have come across a few photos of Paiute men where the resemblance or rather facial features are strikingly familiar but my birth certificate says the race of my father is white.
I won’t judge this woman who did only good with her intensions, who are we to say how or why she chose to fight for a people miss treated in every way?
One of my favorite Grandpa stories goes like this; my cousin mike and I get stoned to the bone and decide to ride our bikes to his house, I think we were around sixteen or so, we knock on the front door, he opens the door leans forward toward us for a better look, leans back with his hands on his hips and says, looks like you boys have been riding in the wind! The old man was shrewd and had a wicked sense of humor.
M. Paul
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I spent my teaching career in inner-city schools and remain a true believer in the American Dream for all Americans. I wish we could “treat each person as an individual,” but until we undo the effects of redlining, exclusion from union trades, and so on and on and on, this is a non-starter if we intend to make real the sentiment that all men are created equal. Race, color, and creed have defined opportunity since the first Jamestown settlement. We can’t just skip past that.
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Some folks want it both ways. If they like the person, then it’s all about how your identity is all about what you say it is. If they don’t like the person, then it’s worse than Armageddon.
Thank you for your steadfast dedication!
100% agreement from this Settler historian and teacher.
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He was something of a prima donna and a very well paid one. Many of us saw him first in On The Waterfront and were stunned, then came Streetcar and all we remembered was “Stella!” A friend from NOLA told me there was a Stella! yelling contest every year or there was before the pandemic. What a hoot.
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I worked with a younger woman named Stella and I gave her my best Brando impersonation every time I saw her and she loved it.
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Indian identity is alternately fluid, rigid, cultural, historical, and sometimes even genetic. But whatever else it is, it needs to come from a position of honesty, which “Sacheen Littlefeather” definitely did not.
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My niece in Oklahoma said when she was in grade school, an Indian classmate told her: “I like you. You are the only white girl I know who doesn’t claim to be part Cherokee.”
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Yes, it’s part of the Tennessee Williams Festival. And this year it was b-a-a-a-a-c-k to the delight of New Orleanians. Laissez les bons temps rouler
I am a descendent of a couple of Native Canadians who had their Native identity schooled right the heck out of them back around the 1880s. I also have two ancestors who signed the Mayflower Compact. This stuff is complicated if you choose to pay attention to it, about which I generally think is a mistake to give it any meaningful amount of attention.
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Good news!
It would be interesting to know the extent to which Native Americans disappeared because they assimilated. From the pictures I’ve seen, most don’t have features sufficiently distinctive from European features that someone who is half Native and half white couldn’t pass as 100% white. As I understand it, the Euro-ancestored settlers of the west were more than 50% male, meaning many men would have a choice between a Native wife or no wife. Some percentage of the offspring of the mixed marriages could pass as white. Most of the next generation probably could.
In a time when white privilege was quite valuable, people had an incentive to claim it.
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