Oral history recordings were made. Podcast material was recorded. The Academy Museum’s collections were enriched with documentation of her experience and her life’s work. For a few weeks in September 2022, Sacheen Littlefeather had something she had not had in 1973: the platform she deserved, offered with the institutional support she had been denied.
She died on October 2, 2022. She had been home in Novato, California, surrounded by family. She was seventy-five years old.
## The Death and What Followed
The death itself was gentle, by the account of those who were with her. The cancer that had been diagnosed in 2018 and had spread since then had been the slow-moving companion of the last four years of her life. She had continued to give interviews, to participate in events, to speak about Indigenous causes, while managing the physical demands of her illness.
The obituaries that followed were largely written in the register of cultural significance — acknowledging her specifically as the woman who had refused Marlon Brando’s Oscar, who had accepted an apology fifty years overdue, who had spent her life after 1973 in service to causes that the entertainment industry had found uninteresting until very late in the story.
Devery Jacobs, the Canadian Indigenous actress known for Reservation Dogs, said on social media that she was honored to have met Littlefeather, calling her one of her idols. Joey Clift, an Indigenous writer, was among many in the Indigenous creative community who wrote tributes that situated Littlefeather’s significance in terms of what it meant to have had someone take that stage at all.