She invoked, in some accounts, the possibility that J. Edgar Hoover — then director of the FBI — had contacted industry figures with a view to limiting her professional opportunities. Hoover died in May 1972, nearly a year before the ceremony, which complicates the specific claim about his personal involvement. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which had targeted civil rights activists, AIM leaders, and other movement figures, was a documented reality, and federal surveillance and interference in the careers of activists in this period was not a paranoid fantasy. The specific mechanism she described, however, involves a figure who was deceased at the relevant time.
What can be said with confidence is that her acting career after 1973 was limited. She appeared in The Trial of Billy Jack in 1974 and Winterhawk in 1975, and she had other small roles, but she did not develop the mainstream career that her Screen Actors Guild membership and her public visibility after the ceremony might have facilitated. Whether this was the result of deliberate blacklisting by powerful figures, or the more diffuse effect of her association with a protest that the industry resented, or some combination of both, is not definitively established by available evidence.
What she did with the subsequent decades is well documented. She studied holistic medicine, eventually completing a bachelor’s degree in the field from Antioch University. She became a health care worker in the Bay Area’s Native American community. In the 1980s, she co-founded the American Indian AIDS Institute in San Francisco — an organization that addressed the disproportionate impact of the AIDS crisis on Indigenous communities at a time when those communities were largely invisible in the broader public health response to the epidemic. She learned care techniques from Mother Teresa, with whom she worked at an AIDS hospice in San Francisco. She directed the First Nation Education Resource Center. She helped change a high school mascot in Marin County that was considered offensive to Native people.