Sacheen Littlefeather was Latina, not Native American, say sisters

Relatives of the late Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American woman who was booed at the 1973 Oscars after refusing the best actor award for Marlon Brando, say she is an ethnic fraud.

Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi, Littlefeather’s biological sisters, say they came forward to refute disparaging claims she made about their family, like that their father was an abusive alcoholic.

“It’s a lie,” Orlandi said in a piece published in the San Francisco Chronicle. “My father was who he was. His family came from Mexico. And my dad was born in Oxnard.”

“It is a fraud,” said Cruz in a separate interview. “It’s disgusting to the heritage of the tribal people. And it’s just… insulting to my parents.”

The reporter, Native American writer and activist Jacqueline Keeler, is known for her work exposing “Pretendians” – people who profit from claimed indigenous heritage but have no Native heritage or community ties.

Keeler had been investigating Littlefeather, who was born Maria Louise Cruz in 1946 to parents Manuel Ybarra Cruz and Gertrude Barnitz in Salinas, Calif. – the hometown of “Grapes of Wrath” author John Steinbeck.

Littlefeather claimed White Mountain Apache heritage on her father’s side throughout her life. After her death on Oct. 2, her New York Times obituary described her as an “Apache activist and actress.”

But Keeley found family and baptismal records of the Cruz and Ybarra families in Mexico going back to 1850, which do not place either near White Mountain Apache territory in Arizona. She traced the Cruz line to a village that is now part of Mexico City and the Ybarras to Pima/O’odham tribal territory in Sonora, Mexico – an area where tribal members were a tiny minority, according to experts.

The White Mountain Apache also has no record of Littlefeather or any of her family members, being enrolled with their tribe.

Littlefeather began claiming affiliation with the White Mountain Apache when she was a student at San Jose State in the late 1960s, according to local Bay Areas news coverage of her burgeoning modeling career.

Both sisters identify as “Spanish” on her father’s side. Their mother was a white European-American.

“I mean, you’re not gonna be a Mexican American princess,” Orlandi said of her sister’s decision to adopt another identity. “You’re gonna be an American Indian princess. It was more prestigious to be an American Indian than it was to be Hispanic in her mind.”

The sisters said they did not speak up because they thought their sister’s fame would eventually dissipate and are troubled Littlefeather is now “being venerated as a saint.”

The pair were most offended by Littlefeather’s characterization of their father as an Apache alcoholic who terrorized them and their white mother.

“My father was deaf and he had lost his hearing at 9 years old through meningitis,” Cruz said. “He was born into poverty. His father, George Cruz, was an alcoholic who was violent and used to beat him. And he was passed to foster homes and family. But my sister Sacheen took what happened to him.”

Both learned of their sister’s death via online news, and neither was invited to her funeral.

“Sacheen did not like herself. She didn’t like being Mexican. So, yes, it was better for her that way to play someone else,” Orlandi said when asked if Littlefeather would have been better off if she stuck with her Hispanic identity.

“The best way that I could think of summing up my sister is that she created a fantasy. She lived in a fantasy, and she died in a fantasy.”