Last month, I published a piece in The Chronicle that investigated claims of American Indian identity by the late actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather. After speaking to her biological sisters and reviewing her family tree back to the 1850s, I found that Littlefeather was not of Apache heritage, as she presented herself the night she became internationally known for taking the Oscar stage in March 1973 in lieu of Marlon Brando. She was of white and Mexican descent — and had no legitimate claims to a tribal identity.
I knew the piece would be controversial; taking down an icon, especially in the wake of her death, was bound to raise anger from those who found her work meaningful. But I will concede that I wasn’t fully prepared for the debate that followed — one that posited Littlefeather’s identity, and all Native American identity, as an existential question too complicated to verify or fact-check. This line of argumentation largely conceded that Littlefeather was dishonest in her self-presentation, but nonetheless suggested that her claims to American Indian heritage, however threadbare, were open to a wider and more fluid interpretation.
A New York Times story on my piece headlined, “Sacheen Littlefeather and the Question of Native Identity,” quoted Littlefeather’s longtime friend and Shoshone/Ojibwe poet, nila northsun (she lowercases her name), as saying Native identity is “what you feel...
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