Warrior Women: Recovering Indigenous Visions across Film and Activism

On March 28, 1973, the Desert Sun criticized Marlon Brando for sending "an Indian woman" to refuse his award for Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) from the Academy of Motion Pictures. Celebrities in the audience and television viewers around the world were shocked when Sacheen Littlefeather (Apache) appeared in "fringed-leather and beaded moccasins" to announce Brando would "not accept the Oscar." Together they wanted to draw attention to the long history of mistreatment of Native Americans by the film industry as well as the American Indian Movement's (AIM) occupation of Wounded Knee.¹ The alliance between Brando and Littlefeather was an act of protest, a show of solidarity, and a call for change. Over forty years later, I had the honor of interviewing Littlefeather about this moment from her past.² She spoke candidly about the stakes of her appearance as an actor and as an activist. On stage that evening, Littlefeather worried about the prospect of violence, as a threatened and threatening John Wayne angrily paced backstage, and whether she might be arrested since police officers waited in the wings in case she upset the show's organizers.

I learned about these chilling details, and the tense atmosphere surrounding this moment of activism, through oral history work, and I am indebted to Littlefeather for gifting me with time, stories, and teachings. As we spoke, I was reminded of Kwe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's As We Have Always Done, in which she writes, of Nishnaabeg intellectualism, that "meaning is derived from both repetition and context."³ Nishnaabeg intelligence cannot be decontextualized, as it must be understood "through a compassionate web of interdependent relationships."⁴ These relationships value difference and the agency of individuals to generate their own meaning. Teachings emerge out of particular lived experiences and must be understood within this context. As I built relationships with Sacheen Littlefeather and also with Lois Red Elk (Fort Peck Sioux), I remained attuned to how I learned from them as elders as well as actors and activists.

I came to this project through another web of relations as well, in search of new understandings about the life and activism of my great-grandfather, the Dakota actor Shooting Star. My research as a Native cultural historian depends upon building ethical relationships with my subjects, whether living or not. I approach research with a deep sense of respect and responsibility for the Native voices and stories I recover. Like Simpson, I am invested in complex learning that takes place within a network of Indigenous intelligence.⁵ Indigenous knowledge systems are "networked because the modes of communication and interaction between beings occur in complex nonlinear forms, across time and space."⁶ I highlight the networked contributions of Native people to American society to account for complexity and contradiction and to offer a fuller understanding of settler colonialism and Indigenous constellations of co-resistance since colonizers come to stay, to destroy in order to replace.⁷ As Patrick Wolfe argues, "invasion is a structure, not an event."⁸ Therefore, I look for the strategies Indigenous peoples use to resist the imposition of colonial structures onto and into their lives, from the past to the present.

For Littlefeather and Red Elk, the warrior women in this essay, there were arenas—social spaces, cultural performances, and work sites—through which they generated knowledge as acts of survivance, Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor's term for "an active sense of presence, the continuance of Native stories."⁹ Through their engagement with Indigenous networks of actors and activists, they shaped counter-narratives as acts of refusal. For Audra Simpson, "the politics of refusal" depend upon Indigenous refusals to engage with modern citizenship as defined by the settler nation.¹⁰ Both Littlefeather and Red Elk refused to comply with Hollywood's imagined Indians. They were central in the "native hubs" constituting Los Angeles's pan-tribal community, which were sites of social activity, community building, job training, and political activism for urban Indians living in diaspora.¹¹ Jay Silverheels (Mohawk) and Eddie Little...