[Mexican...] Sacheen Littlefeather was a Native American icon. Her sisters say she was an ethnic fraud

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

The “Apache” actress and activist wasn’t Native American, say her sisters.
And that wasn’t the only thing she lied about.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Sacheen-
Littlefeather-oscar-Native-pretendian-17520648.php

You might not know her name, but you’ve probably seen the video that made
her famous. In 1973, actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather took the
stage at the Oscars dressed in a beaded buckskin dress in place of Marlon
Brando, after he was awarded Best Actor for his role as Vito Corleone in
“The Godfather.” Claiming Apache heritage, she spoke eloquently, to a
backdrop of boos, of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the film
industry and beyond.

The blowback was swift and brutal.

Presenters ridiculed her during the broadcast. She told reporters that
John Wayne had to be held back by six security guards to prevent him from
rushing the stage and assaulting her. In taped interviews this year with
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shortly before her death,
Littlefeather said that going onstage that night led to her being
blacklisted from the entertainment business.

As the decades passed, however, the calm dignity with which she conducted
herself that night, easily viewable on Youtube, won over many critics. And
interviews she gave in the intervening years, describing a childhood of
poverty growing up in a shack, where she and her white mother were victims
of domestic abuse and violence by her White Mountain Apache and Yaqui
Indian father, made her story a sympathetic one. As such, she enjoyed
incredible public support when it was announced months ago that the
Academy would finally apologize to her after nearly 50 years.

The death of the “Apache activist and actress,” as she was described in
her New York Times obituary earlier this month and in thousands of
articles over the years, was mourned widely and uncritically.

In one of her final interviews, Littlefeather told The Chronicle that she
took the stage at the Oscars because “I spoke my heart, not for me,
myself, as an Indian woman but for we and us, for all Indian people … I
had to speak the truth. Whether or not it was accepted, it had to be
spoken on behalf of Native people.”

But Littlefeather didn’t tell the truth that night. That’s because,
according to her biological sisters, Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi,
Littlefeather isn’t Native at all.

“It’s a lie,” Orlandi told me in an exclusive interview. “My father was
who he was. His family came from Mexico. And my dad was born in Oxnard.”

“It is a fraud,” Cruz agreed. “It’s disgusting to the heritage of the
tribal people. And it’s just … insulting to my parents.”

Littlefeather’s sisters both said in separate interviews that they have no
known Native American/American Indian ancestry. They identified as
“Spanish” on their father’s side and insisted their family had no claims
to a tribal identity.

“I mean, you’re not gonna be a Mexican American princess,” Orlandi said of
her sister’s adoption of a fraudulent identity. “You’re gonna be an
American Indian princess. It was more prestigious to be an American Indian
than it was to be Hispanic in her mind.”

The sisters reached out to tell me their story because, for some time, I
have been compiling a public list of alleged “Pretendians” — non-Native
people who I or other Native American people suspect or proved to have
manufactured their Native identities for personal gain. Littlefeather was
among them.

I put the list together in January 2021, after the New York Times
published an opinion article by Claudia Lawrence to mark the nomination of
Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., a Laguna Pueblo tribal member, to be secretary
of the interior. Lawrence falsely claimed her late husband’s tribal
identity and stole a historical moment for Native women by mimicking a
Native woman’s perspective as she talked down to the interior secretary in
the country’s paper of record. I found this infuriating and began
compiling a list that generations of Native people have been building
since the 1960s to unmask ethnic frauds.

Littlefeather caught my eye.

Her claim to White Mountain Apache heritage, a federally recognized tribe
in Arizona with official enrollment policies and a long history of
isolation from Spanish colonialism, was especially curious. Littlefeather
was born in Salinas, the hometown of “Grapes of Wrath” author John
Steinbeck, under the name Maria Louise Cruz in 1946. Her parents were
Manuel Ybarra Cruz and Gertrude Barnitz. My review of her father’s side of
the family tree, where she claimed her Native heritage, found no
documented ties between his extended family and any extant Native American
nations in the United States.

I did, however, find family records in Mexico going back to 1850. Marriage
and baptismal records do not place the Cruz or Ybarra families near White
Mountain Apache territory in Arizona — and they weren’t near Yaqui
communities in Mexico, either. Instead, the Cruz line goes to a village
that is now part of Mexico City. Mexican Catholic baptismal records and
U.S. military registration cards from World War I and World War II of the
Ybarra men (their grandmother’s brothers) place distant family in
Pima/O’odham (formerly Papago) tribal territory in Sonora, Mexico.
However, Brian Haley, a scholar of California and Sonoran tribes, told me
that these are communities where tribal members would have been a distinct
minority.

All of the family’s cousins, great-aunts, uncles and grandparents going
back to about 1880 (when their direct ancestors crossed the border from
Mexico) identified as white, Caucasian and Mexican on key legal documents
in the United States. None of their relatives married anyone who
identified as Native American or American Indian. All of their spouses
also identified as either white, Caucasian or Mexican. White Mountain
Apache tribal officials I spoke with told me they found no record of
either Littlefeather or her family members, living or dead, being enrolled
in the White Mountain Apache.

A review of five decades of media reports about Littlefeather showed that
her claims of affiliation with the White Mountain Apache began after she
was a student at San Jose State in the late 1960s and local Bay Area news
outlets reported on her burgeoning modeling career. On Jan. 14, 1971, the
Oakland Tribune published a photo of her and identified her as Sacheen
Littlefeather. A few days later, KRON news filmed a short modeling video
of her wearing Native-inspired outfits. And on March 28, 1971, the San
Francisco Examiner featured a photo of her with Cheri Nordwall, an
Ojibwe/Shoshone activist, where Littlefeather is described as “White
Mountain Apache.” In the decades following, she also claimed to be of
Yaqui descent. There is one federally recognized Pascua Yaqui tribe in
Arizona, but she never claimed that tribe specifically.

The sisters told me that their family never claimed this heritage growing
up. After hearing her sister’s stories, Cruz checked with White Mountain
Apache authorities to see if she or anyone in her family were members of
the tribe. She says no enrollment records were found. The sisters also
assert that Littlefeather’s stories about their violent and impoverished
upbringing were also patently false.

On Dec. 6, 1974, the Berkeley Gazette quoted Littlefeather calling herself
“an urban Indian.”

“Never saw a reservation till I was 17,” she said. “I lived in a shack in
Salinas, Cal. I remember the day we got a toilet, and I brought the
neighborhood kids in and gave them the tour.”

“That infuriates me,” her sister Orlandi said when told of the quote. “Our
house had a toilet … And it’s not a shack, OK, I have pictures of it. Of
course, we had a toilet.”

Both sisters insist that their primary goal in coming forward is to
restore the truth about their parents, who they said were good, hard-
working and caring people.

They both insisted that Littlefeather assumed the life story of their
father, who in no way resembled her characterization of a violent Apache
alcoholic who terrorized them and their white mother.

“My father was deaf and he had lost his hearing at 9 years old through
meningitis,” Cruz said. “He was born into poverty. His father, George
Cruz, was an alcoholic who was violent and used to beat him. And he was
passed to foster homes and family. But my sister Sacheen took what
happened to him.”

In a separate interview, Orlandi agreed: “My father’s father, George, he
was the alcoholic. My dad never drank. My dad never smoked. And you know,
she also blasted him and said my father was mentally ill. My father was
not mentally ill.”

As to Littlefeather’s claims she was taken from her “mentally ill” parents
at age 3 and “fostered” by her white grandparents, Orlandi noted: “Their
house was right next door. It was just like walking out the door to your
neighbor’s house.”

When asked how their sister, who they knew by the nickname “Deb” growing
up, came up with her “Indian” name, Orlandi recalled how the sisters all
used to make their clothes in 4-H. The spools of thread and ribbon were
made by a company called the Sasheen Ribbon Co. They suspect that this may
have been the inspiration for Sacheen.

Littlefeather claimed the name was given to her by a member of the Navajo
Nation (the largest tribe in the United States, located in Utah, Arizona
and New Mexico) at Alcatraz. In 1969, American Indian activists took over
the island and, as it was disused federal property, demanded it be given
to them, citing treaties. Littlefeather claimed the name meant “Little
Bear” in Navajo. It doesn’t. That would be “shush yazh.” It is also not
the custom of Diné people, as Navajo call ourselves (I’m an enrolled
citizen of the Navajo Nation) to name people after animals.

Furthermore, Littlefeather was never at Alcatraz, LaNada Warjack told me
in an interview. The long-time Shoshone activist and Bay Area resident
would know: As the president of the Native American students organization
at UC Berkeley in 1968, she was one of the student leaders at Alcatraz.
She lived on the island for the entire occupation spanning 18 months.

“We never really knew her until the Oscar night,” Warjack said. “We
thought that was really cool. That same year she did a spread in Playboy
magazine. We knew no Native would do that. Especially during the 70s …The
last thing we as Native women wanted anyone to think of us was as sex
objects.”

Neither sister knows where the name “Littlefeather” came from. Orlandi
scoffed at her sister’s statements that she got the name from her father
when she danced before him, holding a single feather aloft.

“That she danced in front of my father and always wore a feather in her
hair, in her head? And that’s when my father called her ‘Littlefeather?’
That’s another fantasy.”

News coverage of her burgeoning attempts to make a name for herself in the
entertainment world hint at a possible reason for assuming a Native
identity. About four months before Littlefeather appeared at the Oscars,
on Sept. 28, 1972, legendary Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote a piece
about a turn for the worse in her modeling career:

“Sacheen Littlefeather, the Bay Area Indian Princess, and nine other
tribal beauties are sore at Hugh Hefner. Playboy ordered pictures of them,
riding horseback nude in Woodside and other beauty spots, and then Hefner
rejected the shots (by Mark Fraser and Mike Kornafel) as ‘not erotic
enough.’ Why do them in the first place? ‘Well,’ explained Littlefeather
‘everybody says black is beautiful — we wanted to show that red is, too.’
”

Like many aspiring actors, this was assuredly not how Littlefeather’s
dream of stardom was supposed to go. But perhaps it was better than being
ignored.

Cruz remembers Littlefeather’s desperate attempts to break into the
industry. She recalls once meeting director Francis Ford Coppola as a 16-
year-old high school student while visiting her sister in San Francisco.
Littlefeather lived in a large, beautiful apartment with her husband in
Pacific Heights. Littlefeather had spotted the director moving furniture
into a house in her neighborhood. She approached him and got an invitation
to come over for a visit.

Cruz recalls her big sister putting on “all this makeup on. And I said,
‘What are you doing?’ This man is just asking us to come over for, you
know, casual. Just to hang out with people. So anyway, I was thinking,
‘Oh, brother.’ And then she brings her portfolio. I said, ‘Are you kidding
me?’ ”

The sisters said that the toll of the lies told by their sister over the
years was hard to bear. But they didn’t speak out, as they thought their
sister’s fame would eventually dissipate. Now, they said, it is troubling
to see Littlefeather “being venerated as a saint.”

Could their family have some distant drop of Indigenous blood from
hundreds of years ago? It’s possible; many people of Mexican descent do.
But Indigenous identity is more complicated than that. A U.S. citizen of
distant French descent does not get to claim French citizenship. And it
would be absurd for that person to wear a beret on stage at the Oscars and
speak on behalf of the nation of France. The White Mountain Apache is a
very specific tribe with very specific rules of membership. Falsely
claiming its heritage, using it to become a spokesperson and relying on
dangerous tropes about an abusive Indian father to bolster that fable did
real damage.

Both Cruz and Orlandi learned of their big sister’s death via online news.
Neither was invited to the funeral and did not know when it was taking
place until a priest contacted them.

When asked if she thought Littlefeather’s life or career would have been
better if she had never claimed to be American Indian, Orlandi demurred.
“Sacheen did not like herself. She didn’t like being Mexican. So, yes, it
was better for her that way to play someone else.”

“The best way that I could think of summing up my sister is that she
created a fantasy,” her younger sister said. “She lived in a fantasy, and
she died in a fantasy.”

Jacqueline Keeler is a Diné/Dakota writer living in Portland, Ore., and
the author of “Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story
of Sacred Lands.”


--
"LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
recover with no after effects.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
ballots. Report voter fraud: sf.n...@mail.house.gov

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.