But they still centered white protagonists. They still cast non-Native actors in most Native roles. And they still organized the story of Native experience around what it meant for white characters — what the white man saw, what the white man felt, what the white man learned. The shift in moral sympathy was real; the structural asymmetry remained.
Brando was not making a general statement about racism in American society. He was making a specific statement about the film industry’s specific practices — the casting, the narrative framing, the way Indigenous people appeared on screen as objects of white anxiety, white sympathy, white curiosity, and white guilt, without ever being the subjects of their own stories. He was, as an actor who had appeared in that tradition, implicating himself as well as his industry.
## The Wounded Knee Occupation: Seventy-One Days That Shaped the Context
The occupation of Wounded Knee that began on February 27, 1973, four weeks before the Oscar ceremony, was not a spontaneous uprising. It was the culmination of years of organized resistance by the American Indian Movement — a national organization founded in Minneapolis in 1968 that had been building infrastructure, training community members, and developing a politically sophisticated analysis of federal Indian policy for the preceding five years.
AIM’s founders — Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Eddie Benton-Banai, and others — had created the organization initially in response to conditions in urban Indian communities: the discrimination, poverty, and police violence experienced by Native people who had been relocated from reservations to cities as part of the federal relocation program of the 1950s. But by the early 1970s, AIM had expanded its focus to reservation conditions as well, and had developed a presence on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.