When the letter was read to her, she cried while clutching the framed document.
She said she had never thought she would hear an apology in her lifetime.
## The Academy Museum Event: September 17, 2022
The letter arrived in June. The public event followed in September.
On September 17, 2022, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles hosted “An Evening with Sacheen Littlefeather” — a program organized around conversation, as the Academy’s announcement described it: conversation, healing, and celebration. The event featured Bird Runningwater in conversation with Littlefeather. Indigenous artists participated in the broader program.
Littlefeather, seventy-five years old and in the late stages of metastatic breast cancer — she had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer in 2018, which had spread to her lung — appeared in person.
What she said publicly at the event was consistent with what she had said privately when she first received the letter. She called the apology something she had never expected. She noted, with a combination of dignity and dry humor that characterized her public manner throughout her later years, that Native people are patient — that fifty years is, by some historical measures, not such a very long wait for an institution to recognize its own errors.
She said the apology felt like an apology to all Native people, not just to her.
She said she had no regrets about what she had done in 1973.
Runningwater, who shared the stage with her, called the experience of being there with her one of the most meaningful of both his career and his life.