Littlefeather dared to hold a mirror up to an America that preferred to think of Native Americans as a quaint memory of years gone by.
was only 6 years old when Sacheen Littlefeather took the stage at the Oscars, accepting the best actor trophy on behalf of Marlon Brando and issuing a simple plea for fairer treatment of Native Americans, both on screen and off.
I might only have been 6, going on 7, but I knew enough to know that Littlefeather “had stepped out of line” in a society that didn’t want to hear her message.Know your place”My mother grew up in North Carolina, a sharecropper’s daughter. Her parents — both Lumbee Indians — were so poor they didn’t get indoor plumbing untilwas a teenager. During our Easter and summer visits down South, I remember thinking fetching water from the well was fun, although using the outhouse was not.
My mother was no fan of outhouses either, or the grueling work of a farm hand, plowing by mule, plucking cotton and harvesting tobacco by hand, and missing her senior school dance because there were chores to be done. As soon as she was old enough, she fled north, to New Jersey. And a proverbial shotgun wedding to an Irish American white man, my father, came soon after.It was a marriage that would tear both families apart, coming one year before the U.S.
“Why do you want to go there?” they’d press my mother when she wanted to visit her family in the South, their distaste clearly evident. “You like it better here, right?” they’d nudge me and my brother.
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