Colette Keith| KIPI Radio News
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American woman who famously took to the Oscars stage in 1973 on behalf of Marlon Brando and refused to accept the Best Actor prize in protest against Hollywood’s depictions of Indigenous people. Littlefeather, now 75, was heckled and subjected to racist abuse and was essentially blacklisted as an actor after the incident.
Since the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June, millions of people have faced new barriers to abortion access…But for many Native people, especially those living on reservation land, these kinds of obstacles feel especially familiar. Native American tribes are sovereign nations that have a government-to-government relationship with the United States. Tribes have the right to make many laws on their land and for their citizens—and in theory, that right applies to making decisions about health care, including abortion. But in practice, decades of state and federal laws have limited tribal nations’ ability to provide reproductive health services, leaving Native people with disproportionate barriers to abortion access.
NDN Collective, a Rapid City-based group focusing on indigenous rights, was featured on the CNN program “United Shades of America” on Sunday night. During the hour-long show, NDN Collective along with other Native leaders from South Dakota, focused on the Landback movement. “Landback is about reclaiming indigenous lands and getting land back into indigenous hands, to reclaim everything stolen from us when we were forcibly removed,” Krystal Two Bulls, director of NDN Collective’s Landback campaign, told host W. Kamau Bell. The show took place in the Black Hills, the seat of NDN Collective’s Landback movement.
