This year, Hollywood and the news media took a knee for Sacheen Littlefeather.
Woke news outlets including NPR, the New York Times, and Variety ran glowing articles identifying her as a Native American who was unjustly ridiculed and shunned by the industry when she infamously rejected Marlon Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather in 1973. It culminated in August when the Academy publicly apologized to her.
There was just one problem. According to her biological sisters, Sacheen Littlefeather, who died earlier this month at 75, wasn’t Native American. Her family has no Indian ancestry they could find. Nor did she grow up with a violent and abusive father, as she claimed in the past.
In interviews with the San Francisco Chronicle, sisters Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi spoke about their sibling, Marie Louise Cruz, who as a young activist and aspiring actress took the name Sacheen Littlefeather and began identifying as Native American.
“It’s a lie,” Orlandi told the newspaper 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 added. “It’s disgusting to the heritage of the tribal people. And it’s just… insulting to my parents.”
The sisters said in separate interviews that they have no known Indian ancestry. They identified as “Spanish” on their father’s side and insisted their family had no claims to a tribal identity. Their mother was white.
“I mean, you’re not gonna be a Mexican American princess,” Orlandi said of her sister’s fake 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 also debunked Littlefeather’s claim that their father was a violent, Apache alcoholic.
“My father was deaf and he had lost his hearing at 9 years old through meningitis,” Cruz told the Chronicle. “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.”
Orlandi concurred: “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.”
For decades, skepticism abounded about Sacheen Littlefeather’s identity, with reports hinting she was a Hispanic actress whom Brando had hired for the Oscars. During the 1973 ceremony, she identified herself as an Apache when she rejected Brando’s Oscar, citing “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.”
But Hollywood’s and the news media’s conversion to wokeness in recent years compelled them to elevate her to hero status and to either ignore or suppress the evidence she was a fraud.
The Cruz sisters told the Chronicle said they didn’t speak out earlier because they thought their sister’s fame would eventually dissipate. Now, they said, it is troubling to see her “being venerated as a saint.”
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