Sacheen's Sisters and Why They Came Forward
And why the real story of the lives of Geroldine Barnitz and Manuel Ybarra Cruz deserves to be known
I had planned in this second SubStack post to humanize the parents of Sacheen Littlefeather. After speaking to her sisters, I wanted to make her father something more than the stock character of the negative and grotesque American Indian stereotype of the drunk, violent Apache man. And to see her mother as more than a delicate white flower, living in fear of her savage Native husband ready to beat her at any moment. Littlefeather claimed the couple was so mentally incapacitated that she had to be taken from them at three years of age and fostered by her white grandparents. As if an interracial couple could only be doomed and defective somehow.
I also wanted to uncover their true story because I often find the real story of lives lived in family trees to be more interesting than serviceable fables. The truth is more valuable to understanding our collective American past and constructing a better future for the next generation. We can’t build the future on lies and must analyze history truthfully to learn its lessons.
Living and loving in “Steinbeck Country,” Salinas, California, here was a young couple, a deaf Mexican American man and a German-Dutch American woman, who built a life together. I often say Pretendians flatten history. This flattening occurs because the play-actor must pilfer the trauma of Native Americans and deploy it for ultimate shock value. This way, no one will ask deep or penetrating questions or discover the ruse.
For this reason, their daughter Sacheen (known to them as Marie Louise) told many tales in hundreds of interviews over the five decades after she had her moment of fame at the Oscars in 1973. Yet, her father, who died seven years earlier at 44 years of age, would not know how the world viewed him in 2022. He would not know he had been defamed by his eldest until his younger daughters, driven by inaccurate worldwide coverage of their sister’s death, came forward.
In August, Littlefeather was once again thrust onto the world stage. Nearly 50 years after she rejected Marlon Brando’s Oscar for best actor in the Godfather in March 1973, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced they would apologize to Sacheen for how she was treated at the Oscars.
Pretendians
What is a Pretendian? Simply put, a Pretendian is someone who falsely claims Native American/American Indian identity for profit or clout. They build their careers on it and put it on their resume. Pretendians are not people with actual Native American ancestry seeking to find their relatives and to privately, and without the object of monetization, appreciate that ancestry.
And as there seems to be a lot of confusion around this, what is an American Indian/Native American? Many folks assume DNA1 is the same. This is not the case. We are not a "race." It is a political identity more akin to being a Swedish citizen than someone with a percentage of European ancestry on a DNA test. American Indian tribes are nations that preexist European colonialism and persist as political entities today. Our homelands are under occupation by the most powerful country in the world and constitute the lower 48 states of the United States. American Indians, as such, have been subject to brutal U.S. policies of removal and extermination, culturally, spiritually, and physically.
The only people in this country or hemisphere legally subject to these U.S. policies are tribal members of Native American nations. And in my first SubStack, I gave detailed examples of how these legal restrictions have only been endured by American Indian families who are documented as such and living in Native American communities. Families of “Secret Indians” who have hidden out legally as white people for 175 years would never have been subject to such horrific policies or laws.
For real Native Americans, this sort of commercialized slant to one's identity is unusual behavior. I have 54 first cousins, and pretty much only myself, a writer, and a cousin who serves in a state legislature mention our tribal identities professionally. Most American Indians work ordinary jobs, and their resumes are built on their job-related accomplishments like everyone else. Finding out you’re Native American is not automatically perceived as a golden ticket to financial riches. Or as a God-given right to profiteer from it.
And, notably, Pretendians lack the epigenetic trauma that is part of the inheritance that is even transmitted to a fetus in a Native American mother’s womb. For cosplayers, our struggle is a costume they put on and can devote a lot of time and energy to embellishing as a form of escapism from their real lives.
The performative behavior of Pretendians is appealing to white Americans who run most institutions in this country because the performer is quite often white themselves. In a $2.5 million study funded by the Kellogg Foundation in 2017, researchers found that white people like to see other white people in redface. They found it improved their self-esteem and increased in-group cohesion. Meanwhile, an earlier study conducted by Tulalip tribal member and researcher Dr. Stephanie Fryberg found that exposure to American Indian mascots reduced American Indian youth’s self-esteem.
As part of an extensive investigation into alleged Pretendians (people who falsely claim Native identity for profit or clout), I and a team of volunteer Native American researchers, genealogists, and professors had looked at Littlefeather’s family tree.2 We found no connection to the White Mountain Apache tribe, which she has claimed since 1971 by name. Nor did we find any ties to the Yaqui tribe, from which she has made vague claims since about the 1990s.
Addressing the Academy's Apology
Based on the Cruz/Barnitz family tree research, I wrote my first draft titled “How Not to Apologize to Native Americans/American Indians: The Academy Awards misses the mark when it tries to make amends to the country’s Native Nations.” Unfortunately, it was more than 5,800 words long, and any reporter or news editor would tell you that it is impossibly long to print in a paper. I also put together a “Sacheen Report” and included the genealogy our ad hoc research group had put together and sent that to the paper to be vetted by their legal department. This occurred before the Academy’s special event honoring Littlefeather on Sept. 17, 2022.
However, the length of my article was such that cutting it down was difficult. And I was traveling and unable to get back to the behemoth of a draft myself. Then news arrived on Oct. 2 that Sacheen Littlefeather had died. I was still on the road and in Yellowstone National Park (I’ve written some articles in the past year about the park where my ancestor Lakota Chief Lone Dog, was born). Cell service and wifi at the cabin we had rented were not great. So, I was unaware that Rozalind Cruz, Sacheen’s youngest sister, was trying to get ahold of me until Oct. 10, when I read a Twitter direct message from a mutual named Sally, telling me to call her. It’s hard to believe that was only 18 days ago. Sally wrote that Roz had been trying to reach me for a couple of days.
After Rozalind had found out her sister had died, she began looking on Twitter for more information. She is not a heavy Twitter user and was horrified by all the coverage repeating lies about her family. Then Roz found my tweets and saw where I had shared snippets of her father’s family tree. When I first spoke to her, she mentioned seeing the photo of her Great Uncle Florencio I had tweeted out and how he looked just like her dad and Sacheen. She had not seen many pictures of her extended family. That’s when she decided to contact me and shared what she had found with her sister Trudy.
Did I “Convince” Sacheen’s Sisters They Were Not Native?
There have been, on social media, particularly Twitter, claims that I somehow “convinced” Sacheen’s sisters that they were not Native. Anyone who is Native American can appreciate how ridiculous on its face this accusation is. Being a citizen of a Native nation is a political identity, like being a Swedish citizen. American Indian tribes in the US are Native nations that pre-exist European colonization and contact and whose homelands now constitute the lower 48 states. Could I convince someone they are not a citizen of their own country?
As I detail below, Roz discovered on her own in March 2022 that her family was not White Mountain Apache after she contacted the tribe. Talking to her sister Trudy she discovered that her father was born in Oxnard, California – and not on an Indian reservation in Arizona. By the time I interviewed Rozalind and then Trudy in 6-plus hours of interviews in the second week of October, the first thing they both told me was their family was not (as Roz put it) “tribal.” One of the first things Rozalind told me in our first interview was, “we’re Spanish.”
This is not to say I agree with their description of their ancestry. I told them they probably have Mexican indigenous ancestry, but both sisters declared they would not misrepresent themselves as American Indian. They felt it was disrespectful to tribes and what they had endured.
A tribal member (I assume she is, but I have not confirmed this) has been posting on social media that the Cruz family is from her reservation. This is incorrect. The Cruz and Ybarra families never lived on the White Mountain Apache reservation or in any tribal community in the United States.
Rozalind, Raised as an Only Child
Rozalind is 11 years younger than her sister Marie Louise (Sacheen) and was only nine years old when their father, Manuel Ybarra Cruz, died of cancer at age 44 in 1966. Sacheen was 19 and in college at that point. Littlefeather first attended Hartnell College in 1965 and then, after two years, transferred to San Jose State. Roz said she felt like an only child and abandoned as her older sisters left and her father died, and her grandparents became too old to continue with their childcare-taking role as they had with her sisters. She didn’t know a lot about her dad. And had assumed her oldest sister had been telling the truth about their father’s American Indian identity. He had never claimed to be Apache or any tribe.
Trudy, three years younger than Sacheen, also left for college shortly after their father’s painful death. She recalls scars covering their father’s back due to numerous cancer surgeries that looked like railroad tracks. The sisters say their father underwent many surgeries to remove tumors, parts of his lungs removed, and two ribs. They do not believe he received chemotherapy. He was in tremendous pain.
In fact, Roz’s earliest memories at around the age of three were of moving to Florence, Arizona, an old copper mining town where their Mexican forbears first moved to the state to work as miners around 1880. Their father had been misdiagnosed as having bronchitis, not cancer, and the doctor had recommended moving to a drier climate to help promote recovery. So, Roz, her mother, and her father moved into an adobe house next to her Aunt Mercy’s house. Mercy Cruz Garcia was the half-sister of Manuel and had a different mother. Sacheen/Marie Louise, called Deb by their mother, and Trudy stayed behind with their grandparents to attend school.
They remained there for a year and returned to Salinas when it was time for Rozalind to attend school. Manuel did not recover, and his cancer was finally diagnosed; he endured surgeries succumbing to cancer about four years later.
So from the age of three to nine, the youngest Cruz sister knew only a very ill father. And when her oldest sister told the world their dad was an Apache Indian born on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona, Roz assumed Sacheen simply knew more than her about their dad. Later she recalls hearing her mother speculate that since the Ybarras had been from Sonora, where the Yaqui Nation (they call themselves Yoeme) is, well, maybe they were Yaqui. Rozalind accepted that nugget, too. However, Geroldine had never met her mother-in-law. Anita Ybarra Cruz died when Manuel was still a child. Trudy never believed or heard such claims they were Native.
So, in March 2022, relying on the information provided by her big sister, Roz called the White Mountain Apache vital records department to inquire about enrolling in the tribe. Cruz forwarded the emails she sent to the tribe to me. It was then, and not when she met me, that she discovered that her father and his family had no ties to the tribe, and enrollment was not possible for her or her sisters.
Covering Claims to Native American Identity and Verify, Verify, Verify
That same month, our team completed the tree for the Cruz/Littlefeather family. As part of the investigation, we review and cite interviews given by the claimant. Reading a June 3, 2021 article written by Steve Rose, assistant features editor for the UK Guardian, titled, “‘I promised Brando I would not touch his Oscar’: the secret life of Sacheen Littlefeather.” Rose writes:
Littlefeather’s life up to that point had been difficult. Her father was Native American, a mix of Apache and Yaqui, and her mother was white. They met in Arizona – where mixed-race couples were still illegal – so moved to Salinas, California, working as saddle-makers and leather-stampers. “My biological parents were both mentally ill and unable to raise me,” she says. “I was a child who was abused and neglected. I was taken away from them at age three, suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs. I lived in an oxygen tent at the hospital, which kept me alive.” She was raised by her maternal grandparents, but saw her parents regularly. She recalls a time as a small child when she interrupted her father beating her mother – by hitting him with a broom. “I think that’s when I really became an activist.” Her father chased after her. “I escaped through a doorway and I ran with all my might down the road. And he got in the pickup truck, and he tried to run me over. There was a grove of trees. And it was near dark. I ran up a tree, and he couldn’t find me. I stayed up in the tree and I cried myself to sleep.”
As of today, the article does not have any addendum noting inaccuracies or corrections to this text. Having done her tree, I knew her dad was not Apache, and we could find no connection to the Yaqui either. However, Steve Rose’s declarative sentence in the Guardian that “mixed-race couples were illegal” would not apply to Sacheen’s parents, who were both legally white. Also, we found her parents’ Arizona marriage records. His statement is incorrect and obviously not fact-checked. The couple were both originally from California (Manuel from Oxnard and Geroldine from Santa Barbara) and had met working for a well-known saddlery store called Garcia’s in Phoenix. I alerted Steve Rose at the Guardian, but he ignored my tweet and did not respond until after my SF Chronicle piece was published to respond, “I had little reason to doubt her version of events at the time. You have raised some doubts now, admittedly.”
In journalism, there is the old adage, “Even if your mother says she loves you, verify, verify, verify.”
And indeed, some journalists have seen this as a reckoning of the lack of journalism deployed in the covering of Sacheen Littlefeather’s story. Otis R. Taylor, Jr., managing editor of KQED, San Francisco Public Television, wrote on Twitter.
“My biological parents,” Littlefeather tells the Guardian’s Steve Rose, “were both mentally ill and unable to raise me.”
I attempted to verify this claim by reviewing published material about Sacheen and her family. These included local newspapers (many papers published Facebook-like updates on the local activities of residents), school records, and the 1950 US Census. Still, I could find no mention of her living anywhere but with her parents.
Later, when I met the sisters, they denied she’d ever lived anywhere but with her parents. Their parents had purchased a plot of land in Salinas on what was then called El Camino Real for $5,000. On the lot, their father, with the help of his in-laws, built two houses side by side. Trudy and Roz insist these were not shacks lacking toilets as Sacheen had described but typical if modest, homes for the times. The Barnitz grandparents lived in one, and the Cruz family in the other. The saddlery shop was on the road in front of the twin dwellings. The family also kept a horse named Zurc (Cruz backward) in a corral. Trudy told me that the saddlery was now a realty storefront the last time she returned.
Their parents worked together to build the business: Manuel was a saddle maker of some renown, and Geroldine was a skilled and talented leather stamper. To this day, the saddles made jointly by the couple are highly valued. Rozalind said that she found one on eBay on sale for $3,500.
It’s extraordinary to look at these gorgeous works of art. When I first spoke to Rozalind, she told me how before her mother Geroldine died; she kept saying (referring to her and Manuel), “She wanted their life to mean something.”
The sisters are adamant that not only did they not live in a shack, and Sacheen was not taken away at three years of age, but their parents were not mentally ill. They recall a childhood where their grandparents lived next door, and they moved among the houses and the shop freely, and their father taught Trudy how to ride Zurc. Because their mother worked all day in the shop (and later, was also caring for her husband as he died of cancer), their Grandmother Barnitz cooked dinner for both households every night. Meanwhile, their grandfather, a printer-linotypist, took the Greyhound bus two hours daily to San Jose to set the type for the San Jose Mercury to pay for his granddaughter’s Catholic schooling. He also paid for Marie Louise and Trudy to go to college.
“We were a family that took care of each other,” Rozalind insists.
Trudy confirms that Sacheen did get TB, but it was very mild. She was treated with medicine, no hospital tent, and she recovered quickly and uneventfully at home. However, she surmises that her older sister did learn the way to get their mother’s attention was to be sick. Much of their mother’s attention went to maintaining the business and caring for their father. Roz and Trudy say they were lucky to have their grandparents there for them. The Barnitzes took them to 4-H events every weekend, ensuring they had everything they needed.
Trudy was close to her Grandmother Barnitz, who made her Spanish dancing apparel. She laughs as she notes it wasn’t actually due to her father’s heritage but because her grandmother had made Spanish dresses for her mother to wear at Mission Revival-inspired events in Santa Barbara. Grandmother and granddaughter traveled together to Monterey to purchase a lace mantilla and comb.
Both sisters are adamant their father never hit their mother. They admit he had a temper and suffered from painful side effects of meningitis. He was deaf but sometimes complained that it felt and sounded like a freight train was running through his head. They describe him having to rest his head back in a high-backed chair because the pain would originate near his brainstem.
“He was not a ‘deaf mute,’” Trudy says firmly. Sacheen had described it as such in interviews in the 1970s. She explained that since their father had meningitis at nine years old, he had already learned to speak, read and write. Orlandi said when he was tested, her dad was found to have a very high IQ. Roz recalls how he taught himself to repair engines from a manual.
Trudy also dismisses the story told in Steve Rose’s Guardian article that their dad tried to run Sacheen over with a truck. She said there were no trees near their house. She just shakes her head. The stories told by Sacheen Littlefeather have been a lot to contend with, especially as international media has been awash in them about their parents.
Why Are Trudy and Rozalind Coming Forward Now?
Why come forward now? This has been a common refrain on Twitter and other social media. After Littlefeather has died?
The news media coverage just weeks after the dramatic apology and special event honoring her forced her sisters to come forward.
Rozalind was asked this recently by the New York Times reporter Eduardo Medina, who wrote her sister's obituary. Why were the sisters coming forward only now?
But in fact, Roz has been trying to talk to the media since 2007 and has been repeatedly ignored. She even contacted Medina on Oct. 4 to take issue with his claim that “Her death was announced in a statement by her family.” The sisters, none of whom had children, are the only family Sacheen has, and they learned of her death via online news reports. Her partner, Chuck Johnston, had passed away already.
“The family” the article refers to is a friend of Sacheen’s, Calina Lawrence, who she called her niece in the way many movement Native American people do, as a cultural reference to the traditional kinship roles. The Cruz sisters, however, believe Calina should have made it clear she is not a blood relation. Calina also did not invite the sisters to Littlefeather’s funeral (although the funeral was open to the public and live-streamed). The funeral director was also instructed not to provide Trudy Orlandi with any information if she called. Trudy lives in Marin County, where the funeral was held.
Rozalind told Eduardo Medina from the New York Times that initially, “he had blown her off” when she had contacted him. She tried to get him to remove claims that their father was Apache Indian. All he did was update the obituary on Oct. 4 to include the sisters' names as her surviving relatives.
She said he could have had a scoop. She told him the story before contacting me on Oct. 10. But he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t seek to verify her claims. He wrote what others had written with no fact-checking. Transmitting tall tales uncritically in print and refusing to hear information that could counter them is not just limited to the New York Times and the Guardian UK.
The funniest and yet perhaps concerning example was the experience of Austinlewis87, a Wikipedia editor who was banned for trying to remove unsubstantiated claims from Sacheen Littlefeather’s entry, including her claims to Apache/Yaqui identity. He faced a litany of resistance trying to verify her stories. The edit history of the page is testimony to his frustration, as noted below.
![There is NO CITATION to a reliable source for her claim to be Native American whatsoever. Her father shows up on NO Tribal Rolls (and neither does she).
So, you're basically allowing her to make a claim about her ethnicity that has no veracity and not applying this standard to her claim. Austinlewis87 (talk) 18:59, 2 April 2022 (UTC) [ reply ]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFfsPguHWIAAwqxj.jpg)
![https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Sacheen-Littlefeather-oscar-Native-pretendian-17520648 php
The entire pack of you morons can feel free to eat crow.
2603:6011:4602:B4D4:9814:1097:8D7A:2CAF (talk) 16:40, 22 October 2022 (UTC) [ reply ]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFfsPmA3XoAAiTZZ.jpg)
I also attempted to edit Sacheen’s Wikipedia page but did not wage the battle Austinlewis87 did. I know the pages of living people are protected – and rightly so in most cases. I attempted to correct the false claim in Steve Rose’s reporting in the Guardian that her parents could not marry in Arizona by citing their marriage records. This was rejected because Wikipedia doesn’t cite primary documents, only secondary ones like Guardian or New York Times articles. So, I knew I would have to publish to make that happen. I hadn’t planned to write about Sacheen, but the Academy forced me to do so. And here we are.
My next Substack on Saturday: An Interview with a Yaqui elder from Sonora and Pascua Yaqui Tribal historian. They will explain why we cannot assume all Sonorans are Yaqui (Yoeme).
Definitely read Kim TallBear’s book, Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science (University of Minnesota Press), interview here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129554-400-there-is-no-dna-test-to-prove-youre-native-american/
I was interviewed on this by Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (https://www.aptnnews.ca/infocus/pretendians-and-what-to-do-with-people-who-falsely-say-theyre-indigenous-put-infocus/) and on Native American Calling (https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/wednesday-february-10-2021-exposing-false-native-heritage/.)