That work is still in progress. It is the only possible end to a story like this one.
## Coda: Sixty Seconds and What They Cost
The precise duration of Sacheen Littlefeather’s time at the Oscar podium on March 27, 1973, was approximately sixty seconds. Producer Howard Koch told her that was the limit. She held to it.
In sixty seconds on American television, it is possible to sell a car, or introduce a situation comedy, or announce that a new medication is available — subject to a list of side effects that requires the remaining forty seconds to enumerate. It is possible, in sixty seconds, to communicate a joke, express a sentiment, offer a brief thought on the meaning of a film.
It is apparently also possible to spend forty-nine years trying to erase the sixty seconds, and then another year acknowledging that the erasure had not worked.
She stood in the room that was designed to exclude the concerns she was representing and she said what she went there to say. The people in that room reacted in the ways that people react when something they would prefer not to hear is said out loud in their presence: with hostility, with discomfort, with a fraction of applause from those who recognized what they were hearing.
The institution those people were part of spent the next forty-nine years not acknowledging what it had done. And then, in the last months of Sacheen Littlefeather’s life, it acknowledged it. She received the letter. She held it. She cried.