He addressed the booing directly, saying he was “distressed” by it. He said the audience should have at least had the courtesy to listen. This was not a complaint about personal disrespect; it was an articulation of what the booing represented — the same indifference to the concerns of Native Americans that he had been protesting in the first place. The audience that booed Littlefeather was demonstrating, in real time, exactly the dismissiveness that Brando had identified as the problem.
He described the specific harm he believed Hollywood’s images had caused. He talked about the way Native American children saw themselves depicted in film and television — as savages, as enemies, as obstacles — and what he understood those images to do to children’s sense of themselves and their possibilities. He was precise about the mechanism: representation shapes identity, and the images Hollywood had produced told Native children that they were certain kinds of people and not other kinds.
He spoke about the history of treaty violations with a degree of specific knowledge that suggested genuine engagement with the material. He was not speaking from a prepared talking points list; he was speaking as someone who had read the relevant history and formed views about it. The Cavett interview reveals Brando’s intellectual seriousness about the causes he had committed to in a way that the sixty-second ceremony moment — necessarily mediated by Littlefeather’s improvised speech — could not.
Cavett himself raised the skepticism that had been prominent in the press response: was this not a celebrity using a cause as a publicity vehicle? Brando’s response was to point to the nineteen years between his fish-in arrest in 1964 and the 1973 protest. This was not a new engagement. He had been arrested for it. He had the record.