What such an apology cannot do: it cannot undo what occurred. The booing on March 27, 1973, happened. The career consequences happened. The decades of exclusion from the industry that had been the context for the protest happened. The apology arrived when Littlefeather was seventy-five years old, in declining health, four months before her death. It arrived after a life that had been shaped, in significant ways, by the absence of the acknowledgment it represented.
What an apology can do: it can create a record. It can establish, in institutional language, that something wrong occurred and that the institution recognizes it as wrong. It can give the person who was wronged an acknowledgment that she was right to feel wronged — something that, for Littlefeather, had been denied for fifty years. And it can, at its best, create some modest accountability for future conduct.
Bird Runningwater, who co-chaired the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance and who shared the stage with Littlefeather at the September 2022 event, described the experience as one of the most meaningful of his career. He represented, in his own person, a structural change that the apology was meant to embody: a senior Indigenous filmmaker with a significant institutional role at the organization that had once booed a twenty-six-year-old Apache activist off its stage.
Whether that structural change is sufficient, whether it is durable, and whether the Academy’s future conduct will honor the commitment made in Rubin’s letter — these are questions that remain open. They are the questions that any institutional apology generates, because an apology is a statement about the past and a commitment about the future, and the future has not yet occurred.