At the Academy Awards in 1973, a woman who identified herself as “Apache” Sacheen Littlefeather ascended the stage on behalf of Best Actor winner Marlon Brando, who won for his portrayal of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. But instead of accepting the award, she refused it, then delivered a speech on Brando’s behalf. He couldn’t accept the award, she said, because of Hollywood’s treatment of American Indians.
Almost 50 years later, just after her death, we now learn that Littlefeather was not an Apache, and indeed wasn’t Littlefeather. The news comes from her sisters, who finally decided enough was enough when they saw the leftist mainstream media lionize the fraudstress in obituaries. Her real name was Marie Louise Cruz.
She was Mexican-American.
She was white.
And she spokeum with a forked tongue.
No Abuse in Childhood
After Littlefeather delivered the speech on behalf of the actor, she was an instant celebrity. She spent the next half-century peddling one lie after another, including the fanciful tale that backstage that night, six security guards had to stop John Wayne from assaulting her. It probably would take six if Duke actually tried.
That was only one of her many lies, reported Jacqueline Keller for the San Francisco Chronicle.
“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,” Keller wrote. ”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.”
They apologized for nothing, her sisters Rosalind Cruz and Trudi Orlandi say.
“It’s a lie,” Orlandi told Keeler:
“My father was who he was. His family came from Mexico. And my dad was born in Oxnard [California].”
“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.
The Real Story
A genealogical detective who tracks fake Indians called Pretendians by real Indians, Keeler traced Littlefeather’s ancestry to 1850.
None “married anyone who identified as Native American or American Indian,” Keeler wrote:
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.
Littlefeather even manufactured an abusive, alcoholic father and a deprived childhood of life in a shack without indoor plumbing.
“That infuriates me,” Orlandi told Keller:
“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.”…
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.”
Lied to the End
When Academy Awards leftists apologized to Littlefeather just weeks before she died, she pronounced herself “stunned,” the New York Times reported.
Undoubtedly, she was. Almost 50 years after she perpetrated the fraud on a national stage, she was still getting away with it.
The imposter lied right to the moment she went to the Happy Hunting Ground.
“Last month, Ms. Littlefeather spoke at a program hosted by the Academy called “An Evening With Sacheen Littlefeather,” the Times reported, “in which she recalled the Oscars ceremony and asserted that she had stood up for justice in all the arts”:
“I didn’t represent myself,” she said. “I was representing all Indigenous voices out there, all Indigenous people, because we had never been heard in that way before.”
Although the Times did note Littlefeather’s real name, the newspaper has not updated its obituary to correct her Pretendian lies.
