#small addendum: couldn't reblog the post you'd added this to bc olivaraofrph & I have each other blocked

[princessnijireiki]

The author was the one who told Sacheen’s sisters they weren't Native and then cited THEM as the source of the information.

Oh that's WILD?!

My main impression of the article tbh was that it was very scheisty & exploitative for the author to have clearly either done this research & sat on it until Sacheen died, OR made this her weird little research mission immediately after Sacheen's death (and I don't follow her drama, so I didn't know this in advance, but apparently this very much tracks for Jacqueline Keeler + she has a strong bias against Black & Latino Natives). But the main thing lending it any nuance was the fact that her sisters were willing to go on the record & say all these things.

Granted: racial claims aside, it seems like there was a fairly big family disjoint & had been for a while (Sacheen's sisters weren't personally notified of her death, they weren't invited to her funeral, and they claim her fabricated Tragic Indian backstory pulled from their dad's life, not her own, and unfairly maligned their parents), and the fact that they would even lend credence to a blind claim like that suggests there was more going on— like if I died tomorrow and a journalist called my sisters saying my description of our heritage was made up, they'd block that journalist & have the whole family talking evil on them in a heartbeat, yk? That just means these are old women with a complicated family story, but it makes me take pause a little bit, because... that's a strangely specific thing to go along with if your suspecions weren't already leaning that direction.

But I think what's saddest is that at the end, Keeler clearly tries to lead them to condemn Sacheen, and they still don't. (Quote: "When asked if she thought Littlefeather’s life or career would have been better if she had never claimed to be American Indian, Orlandi demurred.") Even when they say, "Yes, this is my take on what happened, yes, this was a lie," both Rosalind & Trudy refused to take that specific bait.

Either way, what happened at the Oscars, regardless of the degree of pageantry behind it, did still occur. And that was always Sacheen's big claim to fame. And either way, it was long overdue for the Academy to acknowledge they owed her an apology. But even accounting for the shady & malicious intentions behind this reporting, this whole thing feels like a glimpse into a very sad situation that may or may not have one or several grains of truth in it, but which was certainly and deliberately crafted to allow for no rebuttal from the dead.