The significance of the 1973 refusal has been assessed from various perspectives over the decades, and the perspectives of Indigenous filmmakers and scholars are among the most illuminating.
Bird Runningwater, the Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache producer who co-chaired the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance and who participated in the September 2022 event, has spoken about the ceremony in terms of what it demonstrated about the relationship between Hollywood and Native communities. His position at the Academy — organizing the institution’s engagement with Indigenous filmmakers and advocates — represents one answer to the question Brando raised: what would it look like if the industry actually engaged with Native communities as creative equals rather than as raw material for narrative exploitation?
Chris Eyre, the director of Smoke Signals and one of the most significant Native filmmakers working in the mainstream American industry, has discussed the specific conditions that make Indigenous filmmaking difficult: the scarcity of funding for stories centered on contemporary Native experience, the persistent assumption among distributors and studios that such stories have limited commercial appeal, and the way the industry’s categorization of “Native stories” as a niche market reproduces the marginalization it claims to have moved past.
The success of Reservation Dogs — which drew large audiences to a comedy-drama about young Native Americans living on a reservation in rural Oklahoma, without a single non-Native major character and with an entirely Indigenous creative team — complicated the commercial argument. It demonstrated that audiences would watch Indigenous stories told from Indigenous perspectives, given the opportunity to find them.