Jada Pinkett Smith explicitly cited Sacheen Littlefeather when announcing her boycott, connecting the 2016 crisis to the 1973 protest: Littlefeather had been there first, she said. The institutional failures being contested in 2016 were the same institutional failures Littlefeather had identified in 1973.
The apology that arrived in 2022 was partly the result of this trajectory. The Academy that sent the June 2022 letter was an institution that had, over the preceding six years, engaged in a sustained and public process of examining its own failures of representation. The existence of the Indigenous Alliance — co-chaired by Bird Runningwater, a Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache producer with standing in both the film industry and Native communities — represented a structural change that would have been unimaginable in 1973.
The timing also reflected the specific circumstances of Littlefeather’s life. She was seventy-five years old and in the late stages of metastatic breast cancer. The window for an apology she could receive was closing. The Academy president’s letter arrived in June 2022 and was read publicly at the September event. She died in October.
The apology arrived as close to “too late” as an apology can arrive while still reaching its recipient. That is, in a sense, the Academy’s final accounting with the consequences of what happened in 1973.
## What Brando Said on the Dick Cavett Show
Less than three months after the ceremony — on a June 1973 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show — Brando expanded publicly on his reasons for the refusal. The interview is an important document in the history of this event because it reveals a man who had not retreated from his statement and who was willing to engage substantively with the criticism that had been directed at him.