Brando himself had appeared in multiple films over his career in which the portrayal of Native people was part of the period’s conventions. He had played a Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! and had appeared in westerns that carried the standard markers of the era. By 1973, he had developed, through reading and through direct engagement with Native activists, a critical perspective on his own industry’s practices — including practices he had participated in.
This context matters because it situates the 1973 protest as something other than an isolated gesture. It was an intervention in a decades-long cultural practice, made at the moment of maximum visibility, by a person who was simultaneously its beneficiary and its critic.
## The Fifty Years Between
Between March 1973 and June 2022, forty-nine years passed during which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not formally acknowledge what its audience had done to Sacheen Littlefeather on the night of the 45th ceremony.
This does not mean the event was forgotten. It became one of the most discussed moments in Oscar history, regularly recalled in anniversary coverage, film history retrospectives, and discussions of the relationship between the entertainment industry and political protest. It was cited in 2016 by Jada Pinkett Smith when she announced she would not attend that year’s ceremony — citing what she described as the Academy’s continuing failures of diversity and inclusion, she named Littlefeather as a predecessor whose stand she was honoring.
But being remembered is not the same as being acknowledged. The Academy had changed the rules after the event — ending proxy acceptance — without attributing the rule change to what had prompted it. The organization had, in effect, incorporated the incident into its institutional procedures while maintaining a studied silence about the treatment of the person at the center of it.