Littlefeather’s comment that she had “never expected” to receive an apology in her lifetime reflects not cynicism but experience. Institutions do not apologize for wrongs they consider justified, and they do not apologize for wrongs they consider minor. The length of time between a wrong and an institutional acknowledgment of it is a rough measure of how seriously the institution took the wrong in the moment.
Forty-nine years is a very serious measurement.
Bird Runningwater’s comment that the September 2022 event was one of the most meaningful experiences of his life is also instructive. For the people within the Academy who had been working to change the institution’s relationship to Indigenous communities — who had built the Indigenous Alliance, who had advocated for structural changes to membership and programming — the apology to Littlefeather was a milestone in a longer project. It was evidence that the institution had changed enough to acknowledge something it had spent five decades declining to acknowledge.
Whether that evidence of change is sufficient — whether the structural commitments made in the Academy’s letter have been or will be honored — is not answerable from this remove. It is the question that every institutional apology leaves open.
## The End of a Story That Has No Clean End
On October 2, 2022, Sacheen Littlefeather died at her home in Novato, California. She was seventy-five years old. The metastatic breast cancer that had been diagnosed four years earlier had spread to her lungs, and in October it took her. Her husband, Charlie Koshiway, had died in 2021.