She had spent her last active months in a remarkable position: the recipient of a public apology that she had described as something she never expected to receive, participating in a ceremony organized to honor what she had done fifty years earlier, speaking to audiences about what it meant to have been treated as she had been treated and to have survived long enough to hear someone say, formally and publicly, that the treatment was wrong.
She was, by all accounts of those who were with her in those final months, at peace with the shape of her story. She had done the work she set out to do. She had said what she went to the Oscar stage to say. She had spent the subsequent decades doing work she considered more important than acting. She had received, very late, the acknowledgment she had not sought but found meaningful when it came.
The story she left behind is genuinely complicated. Her ancestry is contested by people with standing to contest it — her own sisters, genealogical research, and the absence of documentation that would confirm what she claimed. The Academy’s apology was for treatment, not for ancestry. These are different things, and they need to be kept different in any honest account of what happened.
The 1973 ceremony occurred. The speech was given. The audience booed. The career consequences were real, whatever their specific cause and mechanism. The cause she was speaking for — the treatment of Native Americans by the film industry — was real and documented and has been addressed, incompletely, across the fifty years since.