This Land is Our Land (ep 173)

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and it's been downhill for New World peoples ever since.  Today we look at residential schools, the occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes, the Oka crisis (aka the Mohawk resistance), and Sacheen Littlefeather's Oscar speech.

YBOF Book; Audiobook (basically everywhere but Audible); Merch!

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs  .Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.

Support the show

Music by Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen, David Fesliyan.  

Links to all the research resources are on our website.

Late summer, 1990.  The protest had been going on for two months; tensions were escalating.  Soldiers had been dispatched to enforce the government’s will, but the Kahnawake Mohawk weren’t going to give up another inch of their land.  14 year old Waneek and her 4 year old sister Kaniehtiio were there with their activist mother when the violence started.  Waneek tried to get little Tio to safety when she saw a soldier who had taken her school books from her weeks prior...and he stabbed her in the chest.  My name’s...

 

One of my goals with this podcast is to tell the stories that don’t get told, the stories of people of color and women.  It’s not always easy.  Pick a topic to research and it’s white men all the way down.  But, even when I haven’t been struggling with my chronic idiopathic pulmonary conditions, as I’ve been for the past three acute months, I’ve dropped the ball.  Mea culpa.  So let me try to catch up a little bit here as we close out November and Native American Heritage month.  And since the lungs are still playing up a bit, I’m tagging past Moxie in to help, though I’ve done with I can to polish her audio, even though I lost more than 100 episodes worth of work files when I changed computers and deleted the hard drive on my right rather than the hard drive on my left.  

 

Today’s episode isn’t going to be a knee-slapping snark fest, but the severity of the stories is the precise reason we need to tell them, especially the ones that happened relatively recently but are treated like a vague paragraph in an elementary school textbook.  Come with me now, to the 1960’s and the edge of California, to a rocky island in San Francisco bay.  Yes, that one, Alcatraz, the Rock.  

 

After the American Indian Center in San Francisco was destroyed in a fire in October 1969, an activist group called “Indians of All Tribes” turned its attention to Alcatraz island and the prison which had closed six years earlier.  I’m going to abbreviate Indians of All Tribes to IAT, rather than shorten it to Indians, just so you know.  A small party, led by Mohawk college student Richard Oakes, went out to the island on Nov 9, but were only there one night before the authorities removed them.  That didn’t disappoint Oakes, who told the SF Chronicle, “If a one day occupation by white men on Indian land years ago established squatter’s rights, then the one day occupation of Alcatraz should establish Indian rights to the island.”

 

11 days later, a much larger group of Indians of All Tribes members, a veritable occupation force of 89 men, women and children, sailed to the island in the dead of night and claimed Alcatraz for all North America natives.  Despite warnings from authorities, the IAT set up house in the old guards’ quarters and began liberally, vibrantly redecorating, spray-painting the forboding gray walls with flowers and slogans like “Red Power” and “Custer Had It Coming.”  The water tower read “Peace and Freedom. Welcome. Home of the Free Indian Land.”  And of course I put pictures of that in the Vodacast app.  Have you checked it out?  I’m still getting the hang of it...  The IAT not only had a plan, they had a manifesto, addressed to “The Great White Father and All His People,” in which they declared their intentions to use the island for a school, cultural center and museum.  Alcatraz was theirs, they claimed, “by right of discovery,” though the manifesto did offer to buy the island for “$24 in glass beads and red cloth”—the price supposedly paid for the island of Manhattan.  

 

Rather than risk a PR fall-out, the Nixon administration opted to leave the occupiers alone as long as things remained peaceful and just kinda wait the situation out.  The island didn’t even have potable water; how long could the IAT stay there?  Jokes on you, politicians of 50 years ago, because many of the occupiers lived in conditions as bad on reservations.  They’d unknowingly been training for this their entire lives.  Native American college students and activists veritably swarmed the island and the population ballooned to more than 600 people, twice the official capacity of the prison.  They formed a governing body and set up school for the kids, a communal kitchen, clinic, and a security detail called “Bureau of Caucasian Affairs.”  Other activists helped move people and supplies to the island and supportive well-wishers send money, clothes and canned food. 

 

Government officials would travel to the island repeatedly to try, and fail, to negotiate.  The IAT would settle for nothing less than the deed to Alcatraz Island, and the government maintained such a property transfer would be impossible.  The occupation was going better than anyone expected, at least for the first few months.  Then, many of the initial wave of residents had to go back to college and their places were taken by people more interested in no rent and free food than in any cause.  Drugs and alcohol, which were banned, were soon prevalent.  Oakes and his wife left Alcatraz after his stepdaughter died in a fall, and things began to unravel even more quickly.  By May, the sixth month of the occupation, the government dispensed with diplomatic efforts and cut all remaining power to Alcatraz.  Only a few weeks later, a fire tore across the island and destroyed several of Alcatraz’s historic buildings.  Federal marshals removed the last occupiers in June of the second year, an impressive 19 months after they first arrived, six men, five women and four children.  This time, when laws were passed after an act of rebellion, they were *for the rebels, which many states enacting laws for tribal self rule.  When Alcatraz opened as a national park in 1973, not only had the graffiti from the occupation not been removed, it was preserved as part of the island’s history.   People gather at Alcatraz every November for an “Un-Thanksgiving Day” celebrating Native culture and activism.

RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL

 

The American government took tens of thousands of children from Native families and placed them in boarding schools with strict assimilation practices.  Their philosophy - kill the Indian to save the man.  That was the mindset under which the U.S. government Native children to attend boarding schools, beginning in the late 19th century, when the government was still fighting “Indian wars.”   There had been day and boarding schools on reservations prior to 1870, when U.S. cavalry captain, Richard Henry Pratt established the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  This school was not on a reservation, so as to further remove indigenous influences.  The Carlisle school and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove, or assimilate Native Americans.  “As white population grew in the United States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in the late 1800s, there was increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”

 

Off-reservation schools began their assault on Native cultural identity as soon as students arrived, by first doing away with all outward signs of tribal life that the children brought with them.  The long braids worn by boys were cut off.  Native clothes were replaced with uniforms.  The children were given new Anglicized names, including new surnames.  Traditional Native foods were abandoned, as were things like sharing from communal dishes,  forcing students to use the table manners of white society, complete with silverware, napkins and tablecloths.  The strictest prohibition arguably fell on their native languages.  Students were forbidden to speak their tribal language, even to each other.  Some school rewarded children who spoke only English, but most schools chose the stick over the carrot and relied on punishment to achieve this aim.  This is especially cruel when you consider that many of the words the children were being forced to learn and use had no equivalent in their mother tongue.

 

The Indian boarding schools taught history with a definite white bias.  Columbus Day was heralded as a banner day in history and a beneficial event for Native people, as it was only after discovery did Native Americans become part of history.  Thanksgiving was a holiday to celebrate “good” Indians having aided the brave Pilgrim Fathers.  On Memorial Day, some students at off-reservation schools were made to decorate the graves of soldiers sent to kill their fathers.

 

Half of each school day was spent on industrial training. Girls learned to cook, clean, sew, care for poultry and do laundry for the entire institution.  Boys learned industrial skills such as blacksmithing, shoemaking or performed manual labor such as farming.  Not receiving much funding from the government, the schools were required to be as self-sufficient as possible, so students did the majority of the work.  By 1900, school curriculums tilted even further toward industrial training while academics were neglected.

 

The Carlisle school developed a “placing out system,” which put Native students in the mainstream community for summer or a year at a time, with the official goal of exposing them to more job skills.  A number of these programs were out-right exploitive.  At the Phoenix Indian School, girls became the major source of domestic labor for white families in the area, while boys were placed in seasonal harvest or other jobs that no one else wanted.

 

Conversion to Christianity was also deemed essential to the cause.  Curriculums included heavy emphasis of religious instruction, such as the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes and Psalms.  Sunday school meant lectures on sin and guilt.  Christianity governed gender relations at the schools and most schools invested their energy in keeping the sexes apart, in some cases endangering the lives of the students by locking girls in their dormitories at night.  

 

Discipline within the Indian boarding schools was severe and generally consisted of confinement, corporal punishment, or restriction of food.  In addition to coping with the severe discipline, students were ravaged by disease exacerbated by crowded conditions at the boarding schools. Tuberculosis, influenza, and trachoma (“sore eyes”) were the greatest threats.  In December of 1899, measles broke out at the Phoenix Indian School, reaching epidemic proportions by January.  In its wake, 325 cases of measles, 60 cases of pneumonia, and 9 deaths were recorded in a 10-day period.  During Carlisle’s operation, from 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 children died and were buried near the school.

 

Naturally, Indian people resisted the schools in various ways. Sometimes entire villages refused to enroll their children in white schools.  Native parents also banded together to withdraw their children en masse, encouraging runaways, and undermining the schools’ influence during summer break.  In some cases, police were sent onto the reservations to seize children from their parents.  The police would continue to take children until the school was filled, so sometimes orphans were offered up or families would negotiate a family quota. Navajo police officers would take children assumed to be less intelligent, those not well cared for, or those physically impaired.  This was their attempt to protect the long-term survival of their tribe by keeping healthy, intelligent children at home.  

 

It was not until 1978, within the lifetime of many of my gentle listeners. that the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act that Native American parents gained the legal right to deny their children’s placement in off-reservation schools.

 

Though the schools left a devastating legacy, they failed to eradicate Native American cultures as they’d hoped. Later, the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. win World War II would reflect on the strange irony this forced assimilation had played in their lives.  “As adults, [the Code Talkers] found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service,” recounts the National Museum of the American Indian.

 

In addition to documentaries, I’d like to recommend the movie The Education of Little Tree, starring James Cromwell, Tantu Cardinal and Graham Green, about a part-Charokee boy who goes to live with his grandparents in the Tennessee mountains, but is then sent to an Indian school.

 

There are a number of off-reservation boarding schools in operation today.  Life in the schools is still quite strict, but now includes teaching Native culture and language rather than erasing it.  Though they cannot be separated from their legacy of oppression and cultural violence, for many modern children, they’re a step to a better life.  Poverty is endemic to many reservations, which also see much higher than average rates of alcoholism, drug use, and suicide.    For the students, these schools are a chance to escape.

 

OKA

 

Some words are visceral reminders of collective historic trauma. “Selma” or “Kent State” recall the civil rights movement and the use of military force against U.S. citizens. “Bloody Sunday” evokes “the Troubles” of Northern Ireland. Within Indigenous communities in North America, the word is “Oka.”  That word reminds us of the overwhelming Canadian response to a small demonstration in a dispute over Mohawk land in Quebec, Canada, in 1990. Over the course of three months, the Canadian government sent 2,000 police and 4,500 soldiers (an entire brigade), backed by armored vehicles, helicopters, jet fighters and even the Navy, to subdue several small Mohawk communities.  What was at stake?  What was worth all this to the government?  A golf course and some condos.

 

The Kanesetake had been fighting for their land for centuries, trying to do it in accordance with the white man’s laws, as far back as appeals to the British government in 1761. In 1851, the governor general of Canada refused to recognize their right to their land.  8 years later, the land was given to the Sulpicians, a Catholic diocese.  In 1868, the government of the nascent Dominion of Canada denied that the Mohawk’s original land grant had even reserved land for them, so it wasn’t covered under the Indian Act. In the 1910’s, the he Mohawks of Kanesatake’s appealed all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Canada’s highest appeals court at the time, who ruled that official title to the land was held by the Sulpicians.  By the end of the Second World War, the Sulpicians had sold all of their remaining land and had left the area. Surely the Mohawk could have their land back now!  Nope.  The Mohawk of Kanesatake were now confined to about 2.3mi sq/6 km sq, known as The Pines, less than 1/10th of the land they once held.  The Mohawk people of Kahnawake, Kanesetake and Akwesasne asserted Aboriginal title to their ancestral lands in 1975, but their claim was rejected on the most BS possible reason -- that they had not held the land continuously from time immemorial.  And on and on.

 

So you can understand why they’d be a little miffed when plans were announced to expand a golf course that had been built in 1961, expanding onto land that was used for sacred and ceremonial purposes and included a graveyard.  Again, the Mohawk tried to use the proper legal channels and again they got royally fucked over.  That March, their protests and petitions were ignored by the City Council in Oka.  They had to do something the city couldn’t ignore.  They began a blockade of a small dirt road in The Pines and they maintained it for a few months.  The township of Oka tried to get a court injunction to order its removal.  On July 11, 1990, the Quebec provincial police sent in a large heavily armed force of tactical officers armed with m16s and tear gas and such-like to dismantle this blockade.  The Mohawks met this show of force with a show of their own.  Behind the peaceful protestors, warriors stood armed and ready.  

 

Let me try to give this story some of the air time it deserves.  April 1, 1989, 300 Kanesatake Mohawks marched through Oka to protest against Mayor Jean Ouellette's plan to expand the town's golf course.  On March 10, 1990, --hey, that’s my birthday!  the day, not the year-- After Oka's municipal council voted to proceed with the golf course expansion project, a small group of Mohawks barricades the access road.  With a building.  They drug a fishing shack into the Pines and topped it with a banner that read “Are you aware that this is Mohawk territory?” and the same again in French, because Quebec.  There’s a picture on the Vodacast app, naturally, as well as a photo called Face to Face is a photograph of Canadian Pte. Patrick Cloutier and Anishinaabe warrior Brad Larocque staring each other down during the Oka Crisis. It was taken on September 1, 1990 by Shaney Komulainen, and has become one of Canada's most famous images.  It really should be more famous outside of Canada, like the lone protestor blocking tanks in Tiananmen Square or 1968 Summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos staged a protest and displayed a symbol of Black power during their medal ceremony.  Check it out on Vodacast and let me know if you agree, soc. med.

 

during the summer of 1990 the Mohawk

warrior society engaged in the 78 day

armed standoff with the s.q Provincial

Police and the Canadian Armed Forces in

order to protect an area of their

territory from development known as the

pines near the town of oka.  

This area was used as a tribal cemetery along with

other tribal activities important to the

Mohawks.  The oka crisis or also known as

the Mohawk resistance was a defensive

action that gained international

attention,  taken by Mohawks of the Kanna

Satake reserve along with other Mohawks

from the nearby communities of Kanna

waka as well as the Aquosasne on a

reservation on the American side of the

u.s. Canadian colonial border.  It was one

of the most recent examples of Native

armed resistance that was successful in

stopping construction and development on

to tribal lands.  So what was being

developed that led to this armed

confrontation leading to the death of an

sq SWAT officer during that hot summer?  Golf.  The town of

oka and investors wanted to expand a

nine-hole golf course at the Open Golf

Club into an 18-hole course as well as

build around 60 condominiums into Mohawk

territory.  Since 1989 the Mohawks had been

protesting these plans for development

by the town of oka and investors of the

Golf Course expansion.  Seeing that the local courts were not of

any help in recognizing Mohawk claims of

the land under development, Mohawk

protesters and community members held

marches rallies and signed petitions.

 

Eventually the Mohawks set up a

barricade blocking access to the

development site on a gravel road.  Later

on it was occupied mainly by Mohawk

women and children OCA's mayor jean wallet one of

the nine hole golf course expanded and

filed the injunction against the Mohawks.

He went into hiding during the oka

crisis.

[sfx clip] I will occupy this land for what it

takes he has to prove it to me that it's

his and I will prove it to him that's

mine.  Oak is mayor had stated the land

in question actually belonged to the

town of oka and did not back down from

the issue, but instead filed an

injunction one of many that had been

issued prior to remove the Mohawks from

the area and take down the barricades by

force if necessary.  if I have to

die for Mohawk territory I will

but I ain't going alone are you armed no

the Creator will provide in anticipation

of the raid by the sq mohawks of knesset

Aki sent out a distress call to

surrounding communiti.  In the Mohawk

warrior society from the Aquos austenite

reservation and the American side of the

Mohawk reserve as well as kana waka have

begun filtering into the barricade area

with camping gear communications

equipment food and weapons.  It's difficult

to pin down just who makes up the

Warriors society. the

leaders an organization you each

depending on the circumstances.  the member roles are 

treated like a military secret, which is fitting since many or most of the Warriors were veterans, with a particular persistance of Vietnam Marines.   why the

Warriors exist is easier to answer

 

mohawk have closed off the

Mercier bridge

sparking a traffic nightmare.  Provincial

police arrived at dawn secure position

in case of Mohawk until 8:00 to clear

out.  The natives stood their ground the battle

for the barricade started just before

nine o'clock on one side heavily armed

provincial police bob tear gas and stun

grenade power [sfx reporter]

a 20-minute gun battle ensued dozens of

rounds of ammunition were shot off and

then the inevitable someone was hit a

police officer took a bullet in the face

which proved fatal that seems to turn

the tide the police has been advancing

until then turned tail and fled leaving

six of their vehicles behind.  The Mohawk

celebrated when the police left

celebrated what they called a victory

over the qpm.  Most of the Mohawks each

shot that the raid had taken place

they said they were angry - angry that a

dispute over a small piece of land had

ended in violence.  [sfx this clip but earlier] I mean the

non-indians that initiated this project

of a golf course and then and then

trying to take the land away because

it's Mohawk clan it's our land there's a

little bit left

they're sucking the marrow out of our

bones. 

[sfx this clip, little earlier] we've kept

talking in and saying you know what kind

of people are you

there's children here and you're

shooting tear gas at us we're not we're

on armed and you're aiming your weapons

at us what kind of people are you.  

 

The police retreated, abandoning squad cars and a front-end loader, basically a bulldozer.  They

use the loader to crash the vehicles and

they push them down the road, creating two new barricades, blocking highway 344.  The Mohawk braced for a counterattack and vowed to fire back with three bullets for every bullet fired at them.  due to

the inability of the SQ to deal with the

heavily armed Mohawks

 

The Canadian government called

in the Royal Canadian Armed Forces to

deal with the Mohawks. As the army pushed

further into the Mohawk stronghold there

was a lot of tension with Mohawk

warriors staring down soldiers getting

in their faces taunting them challenging

them to put down their weapons and

engage in hand-to-hand combat.   this is

how the remainder of the siege would

play out between the Warriors and Army

as there were thankfully no more gun battles.

[Music]

as the seige wore

on and came to an end

most of the remaining Warriors as well

as some women and children took refuge

in a residential treatment center.  

instead of an orderly surrender as the

army anticipated warriors simply walked

out of the area where they were

assaulted by waiting soldiers and the

police.  50 people taken away from

the warrior camp including 23 warriors, but that means right over half the people taken into custody were non-combatants.  

by 9:30 that night the army began

to pull out, at the end of their two and

a half months seige 

a number of warriors

were later charged by the sq.  5 warriors

were convicted of crimes included

assault and theft although only one

served jail time.  during the standoff the

Canadian federal government purchased

the pines in order to prevent further

development, officially canceling the

expansion of the golf course and

condominiums.  Although the government bought

additional parcels of land for

connoisseur taka

there has been no organized transfer of

the land to the Mohawk people.

investigations were held after the

crisis was over and revealed problems

with the way in which the SQ handled the

situation which involved command

failures and racism among sq members.

 

Ronald (Lasagna) Cross and another high-profile warrior, Gordon (Noriega) Lazore of Akwesasne, are arraigned in Saint-Jérôme the day after the last Mohawks ended their standoff. In all, about 150 Mohawks and 15 non-Mohawks were charged with various crimes. Most were granted bail, and most were acquitted. Cross and Lazore were held for nearly six months before being released on $50,000 bail. They were later convicted of assault and other charges.

After a community meeting, it was the women who decided that they would walk out peacefully, ending the siege. With military helicopters flying low, spotlights glaring down and soldiers pointing guns at them, Horn-Miller carried her young sister alongside other women and children as they walked to what they thought was the safety of the media barricades.  They didn't make it far before violence broke out. People started running, soldiers tackled warriors, fights broke out and everyone scrambled to get to safety. Up until that point Horn-Miller said she was able to keep her older sister calm by singing a traditional song to her.

 

LITTLEFEATHER

on the night of 27 March 1973. This was when she took the stage at the 45th Academy Awards to speak on behalf of Marlon Brando, who had been awarded best actor for his performance in The Godfather. It is still a striking scene to watch.  Amid the gaudy 70s evening wear, 26-year-old Littlefeather’s tasselled buckskin dress, moccasins, long, straight black hair and handsome face set in an expression of almost sorrowful composure, make a jarring contrast.  Such a contrast, that is beggered belief.

 

Liv Ullman read the name of the winner and Roger Moore made to hand Littlefeather Brando’s Oscar, but she held out a politely forbidding hand.  She explained that Brando would not accept the award because of “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.”  Some people in the audience applauded; a lot of them booed her, but she kept her calm.  Here, you can listen for yourself.  [sfx clip]  At the time, Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, was the site of a month-long standoff between Native American activists and US authorities, sparked by the murder of a Lakota man.  We’re used to this sort of thing now, but on the night, nobody knew what to make of a heartfelt plea in the middle of a night of movie industry mutual masturbation.  Was it art, a prank?  People said Littlefeather was a hired actress, that she was Mexican rather than Apache, or, because people suck on several levels at once, that she was a stripper.  How did this remarkable moment come to pass?

 

Littlefeather’s life was no cake-walk.  Her father was Native American and her mother was white, but both struggled with mental health.  Littlefeather had to be removed from their care at age three, suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs that required her to be kept in an oxygen tent at the hospital.  She was raised by her maternal grandparents, but saw her parents regularly.  That may sound like a positive, but it exposed her to domestic violence.  She once tried to defend her mother from a beating by hitting her father with a broom.  He chased her out of the house and tried to run her down with his truck.  The young girl escaped into a grove of trees and spent the night up in the branches, crying herself to sleep. r

 

She did not fit in at the white, Catholic school her grandparents sent her to.  At age 12, she and her grandfather visited the historic Roman Catholic church Carmel Mission, where she was horrified to see the bones of a Native American person on display in the museum. “I said: ‘This is wrong. This is not an object; this is a human being.’ So I went to the priest and I told him God would never approve of this, and he called me heretic. I had no idea what that was.”  An adolescence of depression and a struggle for identity followed.

 

Fortunately, in the late 1960s and early 70s Native Americans were beginning to reclaim their identities and reassert their rights.  After her father died, when she was 17, Littlefeather began visiting reservations and even visited Alcatraz during the Indians of all Tribes occupation.  She travelled around the country, learning traditions and dances, and meeting other what she called “urban Indian people” also reconnecting with your heritage.  “The old people who came from different reservations taught us young people how to be Indian again. It was wonderful.”  By her early 20s Littlefeather was head of the local affirmative action committee for Native Americans, studying representation in film, television and sports.  They successfully campaigned for Stanford University to remove their offensive “Indian” mascot, 50 years before pro sports teams like the Cleveland Indians got wise.  At the same time, white celebrities like Burt Lancaster began taking a public interest in Native American affairs.  Littlefeather lived near director Francis Ford Coppola, but she only knew him to say hello.  Nonetheless, after hearing Marlon Brando speaking about Native American rights, as she walked past Coppola’s house to find him sitting on his porch, drinking ice tea.  She yelled up the walk, “Hey! You directed Marlon Brando in The Godfather” and she asked him for Brando’s address so she could write him a letter.  It took some convincing, but Coppola gave up the address.

 

Then, nothing.  But months later, the phone rang at the radio station where Littlefeather worked.  He said: ‘I bet you don’t know who this is.’  She said, “Sure I do.  It sure as hell took you long enough to call.”  They talked for about an hour, then called each other regularly.  Before long he was inviting her for the first of several visits and they became friends.  That was how Brando came to appoint her to carry his message to the Oscars, but it was hastily planned.  Half an hour before her speech, she had been at Brando’s house on Mulholland Drive, waiting for him to finish typing an eight-page speech.  She arrived at the ceremony with Brando’s assistant, just minutes before best actor was announced.  The producer of the awards show immediately informed her that she would be removed from the stage after 60 seconds.  “And then it all happened so fast when it was announced that he had won.  I had promised Marlon that I would not touch that statue if he won. And I had promised [the producer] that I would not go over 60 seconds. So there were two promises I had to keep.”  As a result, she had to improvise.

 

I don’t have a lot of good things to say about Marlon Brando --he really could have had a place in the Mixed Bags of History chapter of the YBOF book; audiobook available most places now-- but he had Hollywood dead to rights on its Native Americans stereotypes and treatment, as savages and nameless canon fodder, often played by white people in red face.  This was a message not everyone was willing to hear.  John Wayne, who killed uncountable fictional Natives in his movies, was standing in the wings at that fateful moment, and had to be bodily restrained by security to stop him from charing Littlefeather.  For more on Wayne’s views of people of color, google his 1971 Playboy interview.  Clint Eastwood, who presented the best picture Oscar, which also went to The Godfather, “I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford westerns over the years.” In case you thought fussing out an empty chair was the worst we got from him.  When Littlefeather got backstage, people made stereotypical war cries and tomahawk motions at her.  After talking to the press --and I can’t say I’m not surprised that event organizers didn’t spirit her away immediately -- she went straight back to Brando’s house where they sat together and watched the reactions to the event on television, the ‘compulsively refreshing your social media feed’ of the 70’s.

 

But Littlefeather is proud of the trail she blazed. She was the first woman of colour, and the first indigenous woman, to use the Academy Awards platform to make a political statement. “I didn’t use my fist. I didn’t use swear words. I didn’t raise my voice. But I prayed that my ancestors would help me. I went up there like a warrior woman. I went up there with the grace and the beauty and the courage and the humility of my people. I spoke from my heart.”  Her speech drew international attention to Wounded Knee, where the US authorities had essentially imposed a media blackout.  Sachee Littlefeather went on to get a degree in holistic health and nutrition, became a health consultant to Native American communities across the country, worked with Mother Teresa caring for Aids patients in hospices, and led the San Francisco Kateri Circle, a Catholic group named after Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, canonized in 2012.  Now she is one of the elders transmitting knowledge down generations, though sadly probably not for much longer.  She has breast cancer that metastasized to her lung.  “When I go to the spirit world, I’m going to take all these stories with me. But hopefully I can share some of these things while I’m here.  I’m going to the world of my ancestors. I’m saying goodbye to you … I’ve earned the right to be my true self.”

 

And that’s...Rather than being taken to the hospital for the stab wound a centimeter from her heart, Waneek and the other protesters were taken into custody.  Thankfully, she would heal just fine and even went on to become an Olympic athlete and continued her activism.  And little Tio?  She grew up to be an award-winning actress, best known in our house for playing Tanis on Letterkenny.  Season 10 premier watch party at my house.  Remember….Thanks...

 

 

 

Sources:

https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation

http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17645287

https://hairstylecamp.com/native-american-beard/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/03/i-promised-brando-i-would-not-touch-his-oscar-secret-life-sacheen-littlefeather

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/reflections-of-oka-stories-of-the-mohawk-standoff-25-years-later-1.3232368/sisters-recall-the-brutal-last-day-of-oka-crisis-1.3234550

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/oka-crisis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOIdwcj2w8

https://www.history.com/news/native-american-activists-occupy-alcatraz-island-45-years-ago