Two days after the death of Sacheen Littlefeather, her estranged sister was angrily scrolling Twitter.
She was furious, she said in an interview this week, at the outpouring of praise for Littlefeather, the actress and activist who became famous when Marlon Brando sent her to the 1973 Oscars to refuse his best actor award and denounce Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.
“I was reading what all these people were saying: ‘Oh, rest in peace and she was a saint, and she sacrificed herself,’” the sister, Rozalind Cruz, said. The sisters had been estranged for about 13 years for a variety of reasons, Cruz said, but at that point she still believed her family had Indian ancestry.
Then she saw tweets by the writer Jacqueline Keeler, a citizen of Navajo Nation who has stirred controversy with her efforts to expose what she calls “pretendians.” Keeler was disputing Littlefeather’s claims that her father was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui.
Cruz replied to Keeler on Twitter on Oct. 4 that her grandmother was of “Yaqui and Spanish” descent. Cruz herself had tried to enroll in the White Mountain Apache Tribe. But over the next few weeks Keeler showed Cruz genealogical research that traced her father’s family back to Mexico in 1850 and said there was no evidence of Native ancestry.
Cruz and the middle sister of the family, Trudy Orlandi, were both persuaded by the research. On Saturday, less than a month after their sister’s death at age 75, The San Francisco Chronicle published...
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