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    Lily Gladstone Becomes First Indigenous Person to Win a Golden Globe for Best Actress

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    In a history-making triumph, Lily Gladstone has become the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, said a spokesman for the organization that hands out the awards.Gladstone played Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose family members are murdered as part of a plot to take their fortune, in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Gladstone, whose background is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, is only the second Native actress to receive any recognition from the Globes: Irene Bedard was nominated in 1995 for “Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee,” a television movie.After an ovation, an overcome Gladstone spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language, “the beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this,” she explained in English. She also thanked her director and co-stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, then dedicated the award to “every little rez kid” who had a dream.Here’s her speech:“I love everyone in this room right now, thank you. I don’t have words. I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language, the beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this. To my mom, who even though she’s not Blackfeet worked tirelessly to get our language into our classroom, so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up.“… I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I’m not fluent enough here, because in this business Native actors used to speak their lines in English and then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera. This is an historic one. It doesn’t belong to just me. I’m holding it right now, I’m holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film and my mother [in the film], Tantoo Cardinal.“… Thank you, thank you Marty, thank you Leo, thank you Bob. You are all changing things. Thank you for being such allies. Thank you, Eric [Roth, the co-screenwriter], thank you Chief Standing Bear … and the Osage Nation.“… This is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid who has a dream, who is seeing themselves represented and our stories told by ourselves in our own words with tremendous allies and tremendous trust with and from each other. Thank you all so much.Whether Gladstone is the first Indigenous person to win a Globe overall, that is unclear. The singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, who has said she was born to an Indigenous woman, won a Golden Globe in 1983 for the song “Up Where We Belong” from the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman.” But her heritage has recently been disputed.There have been other Indigenous nominees. This year, the late musician Robbie Robertson, who was Mohawk and Cayuga, was nominated for original score for “Killers.” (He lost to Ludwig Göransson for “Oppenheimer.”) Going further back, Chief Dan George was nominated for the 1970 comic western “Little Big Man” and Adam Beach for the 2007 television adaptation “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”“Killers,” based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, was reconceived early on to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is engaged in the conspiracy to kill her relatives. More

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      In Indigenous Communities, a Divided Reaction to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      The filmmakers’ attention to detail draws praise, but the question of perspective and who gets to tell the story is also at issue.After watching “Killers of the Flower Moon” at a July screening in Tulsa, Okla., Dana Bear emerged from the theater with a complicated mix of emotions.Bear, who is an Osage artist and birth worker, felt the horror of witnessing the murders of her people onscreen. But she also felt a sense of deep relief: For years, Bear had told stories of those murders to her children — tales of poisoned relatives and sleepless nights and charred homes — bearing the burden of that tragic history and passing it on to the next generation.“Now, we don’t have to carry these stories anymore,” she said. “Now, the whole world knows what happened to us.”Bear is one of many Indigenous people who came away deeply affected by Martin Scorsese’s searing film, based on the 1920s Reign of Terror in Oklahoma, when dozens of oil-rich Osage were killed by their white neighbors. The murders were part of a wide conspiracy led by William Hale, played in the film by Robert De Niro. Those he enlisted included his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a World War I veteran who married Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman.The film, which garnered seven Golden Globes nominations on Monday, has divided Indigenous viewers: In a dozen interviews, many of them, particularly members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, welcomed the movie, applauding Scorsese for his meticulous portrayal of Osage culture and noting the ways the critically acclaimed drama has broadened awareness of the killings. But other Indigenous viewers said the movie was told from a white man’s perspective and lacked sufficient context about the U.S. government’s complicity in the murders.An oil strike in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Some critics say the movie fails to deal with the role the federal government played in the Reign of Terror. AppleTV+“It still felt to me like it was a story about the white men,” said Tim Landes, who is Cherokee and an editor for TulsaPeople magazine. “It was still framed around the criminals who did the bad deeds.” He said he wished the movie had been created by an Indigenous artist.“There are numerous Indigenous filmmakers, especially in Oklahoma, who are just anxiously awaiting their shot,” he said.There seems to be broad agreement in Indigenous circles that the drama succeeded in accurately portraying the culture and language of the Osage people. Scorsese and his production team took great pains to incorporate Osage feedback into the movie, community members said. In 2019, several years into the making of the movie, Scorsese and his crew met with more than 200 Osage people, discussing tribe members’ concerns about the movie and asking them questions about their lives.“My position always was let’s make sure we’re not going to be stereotyped as Hollywood always does,” said Geoffrey Standing Bear, principal chief of the Osage Nation. “Let’s make sure our story to be told by us as much as possible. And we did a good job of that. This was a movie where you hear the Osage language. You hear the sounds of our music.”In an email to The New York Times, Scorsese said, “We felt a great responsibility to get the story right and this is extremely sensitive territory for the Osage.”Dozens of oil-rich Osage were killed by their white neighbors in the 1920s.The movie was filmed in Osage County and Washington County, Okla., and throughout production, Scorsese and his team worked with Osage experts on clothing, language, art and more. Many Osage people also acted as extras.“The way that they were able to consult and really fold in the community gave it its authenticity,” said Addie Roanhorse, who worked in the film’s art department and is a direct descendant of Henry Roan. (Played by William Belleau, he is depicted in the film as having “melancholy” and is killed by one of Hale’s henchmen.)Scorsese, Gladstone and DiCaprio attended many tribal ceremonies to learn more about their traditions, said Gigi Sieke, an Osage member who appears as an extra in the final scene. She remembers the production team going to her grandfather’s 100-year-old house to measure his table and examine the antiques he owned. When she first watched the movie, she was amazed by how closely the film mirrored the customs of her people, from the way they prayed to the minutiae of their clothing.Still, it was often painful to watch the film. Dana Bear said she was depressed for a month after the screening, saddened by the reality of how Osage members had been brutally treated.Growing up, Bear remembered, she saw an elderly man, known to her as “Cowboy,” at grocery stores or gas stations in Fairfax, Okla. It was not until watching the movie that it dawned on her that he was the son of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart.“It’s not the distant past,” she said. “My grandma lived through that. A lot of families left during that time out of fear and you can look around and see where those families left.”While many of the Indigenous people interviewed approved of the film, others said it failed to reckon with the ways the murders had been enabled by the federal government’s systematic oppression of Indigenous people.The film could have included greater context about how the murders were not isolated events but part of a broader history of colonization, said Elizabeth Rule, a Chickasaw Nation member and a professor of critical race, gender and culture studies at American University.“Violence against Indigenous people unfolded in a systematic way across additional communities in different parts of the country,” she said.The movie also shied away from the federal government’s history of capturing Native American land through the allotment system, making it easier for the properties to be transferred to white men, said Robert Warrior, an Osage professor of American literature and culture at the University of Kansas.“It’s not the distant past,” Dana Bear said. “My grandma lived through that.”AppleTV+Other critics say that the film centered the perspective of white men rather than that of Mollie and other Osage people, and that the story could have been better told by an Indigenous filmmaker.“It would take an Osage to tell the story from the Osage perspective,” said Joel Robinson, an Osage member from Kentucky who wrote a viral review of the movie on Letterboxd. “Someone who has never had to come at it from a place of learning and discovery. Someone who has had it embedded in them.”The fault lies with an entertainment industry that continues to elevate white people’s creative choice over those of Indigenous filmmakers, he said. “In the current Hollywood system, there’s no shot that the studio would come in and be like, ‘Oh you’re Osage, do you want to make this movie? Here’s $200 million,’” he said, referring to the reported budget of the film.Scorsese took issue with the contention that “Killers” elevates a white man’s point of view over an Indigenous one. “I can’t really agree that the story is told primarily from a white man’s perspective,” Scorsese said. “I wanted to create a kind of panoramic perspective. There are many interwoven characters and strands in the story. The majority of the white characters are swindlers, thieves and murderers. That includes Ernest and Bill, of course. I think the picture really isn’t from their ‘perspective.’”But Jeremy Charles, a Cherokee filmmaker, said the movie reminded him how much progress was still needed to improve Indigenous representation in cinema.“We’re telling these kinds of stories predominantly through a white colonizer lens is the main issue,” he said. “What I’ve been working on and what many Indigenous filmmakers have been working on is getting more stories told from an Indigenous perspective into the mainstream.”“The world,” he said, “is hungry for our stories.” More

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      Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned

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      An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts.The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned after CBC News reported that it had found a birth certificate indicating that she was born to white parents in Massachusetts, and not on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada.Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation, which was published on Friday, pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria.Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her “growing-up Mom” had told her that she was adopted and was Native. In both a 2018 biography and the statements, Sainte-Marie also says she was told she may have been born “on the wrong side of the blanket,” referring to an affair.“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” Sainte-Marie, 81, said in the written statement. “Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”Sainte-Marie, whose songs include “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” won an Oscar in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” a song from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” “I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she told The New York Times last year.News of the investigation was particularly surprising to Canadians because Sainte-Marie is such a well-known figure, said Kimberly Tallbear-Dauphine, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta who was quoted in the CBC article.“She’s a celebrity but she’s also somebody a lot of Indigenous people know and have met with, and that makes it more personal,” Tallbear-Dauphine said in an interview with The Times. Emails and text messages she has received show that people are “feeling very emotional about this.”The freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler said in the CBC investigation that she began looking for Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate after watching an “American Masters” episode about the singer last year. Keeler wrote a column for The San Francisco Chronicle last year that challenged the Indigenous heritage of the actor Sacheen Littlefeather.In their article, CBC reporters described how they obtained Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate from Feb. 20, 1941, which says she was born to Winifred and Albert Santamaria at 3:15 a.m. The CBC said the Santamarias were of Italian and English ancestry; in her statements, Sainte-Marie said Winifred was part Mi’kmaq, a tribe from eastern Canada.The investigation also cites a 1945 life insurance policy document that says Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham and a 1982 marriage certificate in which Sainte-Marie certified that she was born in Massachusetts. Also included was a 1964 newspaper article in which an uncle of Sainte-Marie’s disputed her claims that she was Indigenous, saying, “This is all part of the professional build-up.”A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. “Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,” the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC.After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said that “Buffy is our family.”“We chose her and she chose us,” they said. “We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” More

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      Marvel Superhero and Indigenous Actress Holds Fast to Maya Roots

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      After filming her part in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” María Mercedes Coroy returned to her “normal” life of farming and trading in a Guatemalan town at the base of a volcano.SANTA MARÍA DE JESÚS, Guatemala — For her big underwater scene in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the Guatemalan actress María Mercedes Coroy had to hold her breath as her character, Princess Fen, gives birth in a hazy ocean world to a winged serpent son.She emerges from the watery depths as a rarity even in Marvel’s fantastical universe: a female Maya superhero.The day after filming her final scene in Los Angeles, Ms. Coroy, rather than hanging out in Hollywood, headed home to Santa María de Jesús, a Kaqchikel Maya town of about 22,000 at the base of a volcano in Guatemala. By nightfall, she was curled up in bed in her family’s bright pink cinder block house with vegetables growing in the backyard.“I felt like my bed was hugging me,” said Ms. Coroy, 28, one of nine siblings in a family of farmers and vendors.The next morning she resumed her usual life. She and her mother put on their hand-woven huipiles, or blouses, and cortes, or skirts, to catch the 5:30 bus to the small city of Escuintla to sell produce in the bustling market, a job she started after fifth grade when she had to drop out of school to help her parents.The main square of Santa María de Jesús, Guatemala, Ms. Coroy’s hometown.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesSome days she walks two hours with a mule to the family farm to cultivate cabbage and pumpkins. In her spare time, she weaves colorful huipiles with motifs of birds and flowers on a backstrap loom.“People ask me what I do after filming,” said Ms. Coroy, who is working on her third Guatemalan movie after appearing in two in the United States. “I go back to normal.”Ms. Coroy represents a new generation of Maya actors determined to hone their craft while holding onto their customs and helping expose a legacy of discrimination against Guatemala’s Indigenous population.While she said she enjoys acting in the United States — and posing in a pink and blue huipil at the 2021 Golden Globe Awards — she is more interested in her own country’s burgeoning film industry.But whether she’s working in her homeland or Hollywood, acting can be draining, and she relies on Santa María de Jesús to recharge her.“I love my life, but filming is physically demanding,” Ms. Coroy said, relaxing on a bench in Santa María’s central park. “This is my community.”Ms. Coroy’s first role was the lead in a school play production of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”A mural depicting the actress on a wall of her hometown.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesSanta María de Jesus has long been locally famous for its street theater, and a decade ago, the Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante came to the town to prepare for his first feature film, “Ixcanul” (“Volcano”). He wanted to tell a story of Maya women that addressed issues like endemic poverty and inequities in education and health care, and he was determined to cast Maya actors speaking the Indigenous language of Kaqchikel.Mr. Bustamante initially put up a sign in the town’s central park: Casting Here. No one showed up. A few days later he posted: Work Here. He was overwhelmed with prospective actors.Ms. Coroy missed the audition. But a friend put her in touch with the director the next day.“He told me I was the only person who looked him in the eye,” she said. When he offered her the lead, she balked. “I had no experience. I was afraid I would ruin the movie.”But he convinced her to join the cast. For the next several months, they trained at the country’s first film academy, founded by Mr. Bustamente.“When we began filming, they were no longer amateur actors,” Mr. Bustamente said.“Ixcanul,” which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, focuses on a poor family in the mountains that arranges for the daughter to marry a plantation overseer. The daughter secretly gets involved with a young man, a drunk and a dreamer, who promises to take her with him to the United States. But he leaves without her and she finds herself pregnant while still engaged to the other man.After she gives birth in a hospital, a staff member tells her that her baby has died. When the young woman finds out later that her child had lived and had possibly been sold for adoption, grief consumes her.Ms. Coroy, center, with her neighbors. Daniele Volpe for The New York Times“Quiet and fearless,” the Los Angeles-based film critic Manuel Betancourt wrote of Ms. Coroy’s understated performance, which revealed anguish behind a still face.“I mouthed the words I was feeling in my head,” Ms. Coroy said, explaining her acting method. “It was easier then because I was naturally timid. I’m much more animated now.”Her second film with Mr. Bustamante, “La Llorona,” transformed a traditional Latin American ghost story into an indictment of a fictional dictator, but one clearly reminiscent of the Guatemalan leader, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt. Five years before his death in 2018, General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity for the systematic slaughter of Maya men, women and children in the 1980s after he took control of the country in a coup.Ms. Coroy plays Alma, a Maya housemaid whose son and daughter were among those murdered. A spectral figure in white, she haunts the dictator in his home.A casting director saw her in the two Bustamante films and picked her for the part of an Indigenous guerrilla in “Bel Canto,” an American film starring Julianne Moore. For two-and-a-half months, Ms. Coroy filmed in Mexico and the United States, the longest she had ever been away from her family. She froze in New York, she said, and didn’t like the food.The actress prefers not to discuss politics. But Mr. Bustamante said artists in Guatemala worked in an increasingly hostile climate.“You realize you’re in a country where there is a dictatorship without that name,” Mr. Bustamante wrote in an email interview. “There is a murky sort of oppression and no rights or freedom.”In “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Ms. Coroy’s character gives birth underwater. When “Ixcanul” was released, he wrote, “there was a general rejection by the Guatemalan people of this sort of subject matter. With La Llorona, it was much more dangerous. We received anonymous threats.”“Wakanda Forever,” a global blockbuster distributed by Disney, also addresses the oppression of the Maya.Ms. Coroy’s character, Princess Fen, catches smallpox brought by the Spaniards to the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th century. A shaman gives her a drink that allows her to live and give birth underwater. When her winged son Namor, played by the Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta, returns to the Yucatán, he sees Spaniards beating the Maya they have enslaved.In Guatemala, some Maya families encourage their children to speak only Spanish and wear Western clothing to escape ongoing rampant discrimination. But that’s not how Ms. Coroy was raised.“My parents tell me I should be proud,” said Ms. Coroy, who eventually returned to night school and finished college. “There is no way that you can hide that you’re Indigenous.”She has recently begun delving into Maya spirituality. Her grandmother was a natural healer who taught her about the curative properties or herbal teas and flowers. While she worships in a Catholic church, she also studies with an Indigenous spiritual teacher and reads the Maya creation story, the Popol Vuh.Central to Maya religion is Maximón, a trickster deity both benevolent and hedonistic. In ceremonies, adherents smoke and drink in front of his wooden figure in the hopes he will hear their entreaties. Ms. Coroy attends ceremonies without imbibing, she said.“People ask me what I do after filming,” Ms. Coroy said. “I go back to normal.”Daniele Volpe for The New York Times“I respect Maximón,” she said. “I have connected with him in dreams. He said, ‘You neither speak well of me nor poorly, so I will protect you.’”While she’s famous enough in Guatemala that people in the colonial tourist city of Antigua, a UNESCO World heritage site, approach her politely for autographs, her neighbors in Santa María avoid singling her out. Walking in the town’s park, she might as well be any other vendor.“There’s no movie star culture here,” Ms. Coroy said. “There are no paparazzi.” More

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      Sacheen Littlefeather and the Question of Native Identity

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      The actress, who died Oct. 2, became famous for a protest at the 1973 Oscars. Now a researcher and Littlefeather’s own sisters dispute her claims that she was Native American. Her defenders say Indian identity is a complex matter.Two days after the death of Sacheen Littlefeather, her estranged sister was angrily scrolling Twitter.She was furious, she said in an interview this week, at the outpouring of praise for Littlefeather, the actress and activist who became famous when Marlon Brando sent her to the 1973 Oscars to refuse his best actor award and denounce Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.“I was reading what all these people were saying: ‘Oh, rest in peace and she was a saint, and she sacrificed herself,’” the sister, Rozalind Cruz, said. The sisters had been estranged for about 13 years for a variety of reasons, Cruz said, but at that point she still believed her family had Indian ancestry.Then she saw tweets by the writer Jacqueline Keeler, a citizen of Navajo Nation who has stirred controversy with her efforts to expose what she calls “pretendians.” Keeler was disputing Littlefeather’s claims that her father was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui.Cruz replied to Keeler on Twitter on Oct. 4 that her grandmother was of “Yaqui and Spanish” descent. Cruz herself had tried to enroll in the White Mountain Apache Tribe. But over the next few weeks, Cruz said, Keeler showed her genealogical research that traced her father’s family back to Mexico in 1850 and said there was no evidence of Native ancestry.Cruz and the middle sister of the family, Trudy Orlandi, were both persuaded by the research. Last Saturday, less than a month after their sister’s death at age 75, The San Francisco Chronicle published an opinion column by Keeler under the headline, “Sacheen Littlefeather was a Native American icon. Her sisters say she was an ethnic fraud.”The column unleashed an intense response in Native American circles on social media.Some condemned Littlefeather, saying she had fabricated an identity to promote her Hollywood career. But others strongly objected to Keeler’s investigation, saying it ignored the complicated ways Native identity can be formed, particularly for those who do not meet the formal criteria for tribal membership. Enrollment typically requires proof of tribal ties, often described in terms of one’s percentage of “Indian blood,” or “blood quantum.”“What many people don’t understand about Native existence is that some Natives aren’t enrolled,” Laura Clark, a journalist who is Muscogee and Cherokee, wrote in Variety in response to Keeler’s column.“Some Natives are reconnecting with their tribes,” Clark wrote. “Some Natives don’t have enough ‘Indian blood’ to register because of blood quantum minimums. And some Natives have had their tribes nearly erased to the point that organized citizenship records simply don’t exist.”The Shoshone poet nila northsun, a friend of Littlefeather’s from their college days in the 1970s, said this week that she was not surprised that Keeler had failed to find tribal affiliations in family records.Native Americans, she said, might have hidden their backgrounds to avoid discrimination or were misidentified.“It’s what you feel in your heart, and what your belief system is,” said northsun, who lowercases her name. “Just because she’s not enrolled or can’t be identified in records doesn’t mean she’s not Indigenous.”In an interview on Wednesday, Keeler rejected such assertions, saying she and volunteer researchers had reviewed records for hundreds of Littlefeather’s relatives. None identified as Native American, nor did they live with or marry members of any Apache tribe or anyone identifying as Yaqui, according to a summary of the research she published on Substack.“Could their family have some distant drop of Indigenous blood from hundreds of years ago?” she wrote in the column. “It’s possible; many people of Mexican descent do. But Indigenous identity is more complicated than that. A U.S. citizen of distant French descent does not get to claim French citizenship. And it would be absurd for that person to wear a beret on stage at the Oscars and speak on behalf of the nation of France.”It was not known if Littlefeather had ever tried to enroll in a tribe. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona said in a statement that Littlefeather was not an enrolled member of the tribe, and neither were her parents.“However,” the tribe said, “that does not mean that we could independently confirm that she is not of Yaqui ancestry generally, from Mexico or the Southwestern United States.”The White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona did not immediately release a statement.Littlefeather was born Marie Cruz in 1946 and said in interviews over the years that her father, Manuel Ybarra Cruz, was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui and had abused her and her mother, Geroldine Cruz, who was of French, German and Dutch lineage.Rozalind Cruz, 65, of Big Arm, Mont., and Orlandi, 72, of San Anselmo, Calif., have strongly disputed their sister’s accounts of their father’s alcoholism and abuse. He died in 1966 at age 44, when Littlefeather was 19.At the 1973 Academy Awards, Sacheen Littlefeather refused the Academy Award for best actor on behalf of Marlon Brando for his role in “The Godfather.”BettmannBy age 26, Littlefeather was fully identifying as Native American when she protested at the Oscars, wearing a buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties. She spent the next five decades as an activist in the Native American community and was married to Charles Johnston, a member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma, who died last year.She became a revered figure for some. In August, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it had apologized to Littlefeather, calling her treatment at the Oscars, where she was booed, “unwarranted and unjustified.”In a statement on Thursday, the Academy Museum, which hosted an event honoring Littlefeather in September, said that it was aware of claims going back decades about her background but that “the Academy recognizes self-identification.”Cruz said that her father, who was deaf and communicated with sign language or a chalkboard, had never told her about Native American relatives.She said she had grown up knowing she had Spanish and Mexican heritage but also believed for most of her life that she was “probably about a quarter” Native American because of her older sister’s professed identity.Cruz said she had even applied last November to become a member of the White Mountain Apache Tribe but was denied because the tribe could not find records to support her claim. But that all changed after her sister’s death. She recalled telling Keeler on the phone: “You’re right. She’s a fraud. She’s a phony.”Some scholars agree, saying Keeler’s research was persuasive.“Keeler proves Littlefeather was a troubled woman who made the stories of others her own,” said Liza Black, an associate professor of history and Native American and Indigenous studies at Indiana University, and a citizen of Cherokee Nation.She said that many Native people understand the complexity of identity because of multiple tribal affiliations, blood quantum restrictions and adoptions, but that “Littlefeather does not fall into any of these true, real and complex Native identities.”Keeler’s research to prove that people are faking Indian identities has prompted blowback from critics who said that her work casts a cloud of suspicion over all Indigenous people.It suggests that “Native people need to create a system where they have to prove who they say they are,” said Andrew Jolivétte, the director of Native American and Indigenous studies at the University of California San Diego, who describes himself as Creole of Opelousa, Atakapa Ishak, French, African, Irish, Italian and Spanish descent.“Why do American Indians have to do that and not other people?” he added.For Keeler, to be Native American or American Indian is to be part of a clearly defined political group that existed before European colonial contact.“We’re not just an identity,” she said. “We are actually a political class. We are citizens of nations. We are sovereign.” Her goal, she said, is to stop non-Indians from profiting off false claims of being Native American.“We want real change and we want real justice, and that’s not going to happen when it all comes down to actors playing us,” she said.For her part, Cruz said she had no regrets.“All I did was, I put a pebble out there,” she said. “And I let the water rip.” More

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      Quinn Christopherson Finds Cause for Celebration

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      On his debut album, the Alaskan singer-songwriter moved into new emotional territory.Born in Anchorage to a wedding D.J. father and a karaoke-loving mother (whose own grandfather was a skilled luthier), Quinn Christopherson got his start in a music scene he describes as “closed in, so there’s nowhere to run.” For about six years, he played local shows and open mic nights while doing construction gigs and working with homeless and runaway teens at Covenant House. But that all changed in 2019, when he won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with his melancholy single “Erase Me,” which details his raw feelings relating to his gender transition. Last month, after wrapping a summer tour with Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker and Angel Olsen, he released his debut album. “Write Your Name in Pink” is the sort of dreamy record you want to listen to at night, maybe with some flickering candles.“I’m glad I gave music a full-time shot, because in the past my songs were really sad,” says the 30-year-old Alaska Native, who is of Ahtna and Iñupiat ancestry. “The sliver of time I spent on music was spent trying to heal myself. When I started coming into my studio every morning, I could cover all kinds of emotions instead of just using [my music] as therapy.”His new offerings are more joyful — a celebration, he says, of his youth. Not that the songs are any less deeply felt. “Neighborhood,” the first track he wrote for the album, concerns Christopherson’s complex relationship with his mother. “Retelling these stories, I learn along the way,” he says. “My mom and I had some really rough times, but she was hurt before she hurt me. Having empathy for her younger self is important in telling my story, too.”His family has never hid their struggles, Christopherson says, and their openness has inspired him to be vulnerable in his music. “We, as native people, have had a lot to overcome, and we’re still climbing our way out of it,” he says. “You can take a lot of things from people, but you can’t take our stories.” More

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      Baratunde Thurston Wants You to Be Part of Nature. Right Now.

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      The author of “How to Be Black” and host of the “How to Citizen with Baratunde” podcast wants you to experience the outdoors with a new PBS television series.In the midst of the pandemic, Baratunde Thurston decided to start a garden.It was a way for the author, podcaster and TV host to reconnect with his love of the outdoors, and process his feelings about the tumultuous state of the world.“Unfortunately, the squirrels thought I was gardening for them,” Mr. Thurston said. “In the beginning, I saw it as a battle — me versus the squirrels. Over time I realized, these squirrels are my neighbors, too. Maybe we can work something out.”Connecting with the environment, respecting wildlife and finding reverence in nature are all themes of Mr. Thurston’s new television series, “America Outdoors.” The six-part show follows him on a range of outdoor adventures, from running with ultramarathoners in Death Valley, Calif., to bird-watching in Minnesota and trekking through the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina. Viewers learn that nature can be enjoyed by everyone.“Doing a show based in the outdoors was really the right move in terms of ways to experience this country,” Mr. Thurston said. “I got to hang out with true outdoor enthusiasts and was reminded that you don’t have to be obsessive, or particularly well-resourced, to enjoy the outdoors.”“America Outdoors” premieres July 5 on PBS. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.The show is as much about outdoor destinations as it is about people. How do you define an “outdoor enthusiast?”This show is about breaking expectations. When I hear “the outdoors,” I have an extreme landscape like El Capitan in mind. I have a white guy in mind, with a beard, and he’s looking off into the distance, having just conquered something. And we did spend some time with people like that, but we also spent time with the original people on this land. It was a beautiful privilege that I got to interview people from three different Indigenous nations.We spent time with folks who have disabilities, and I got to be guided down a river, white-water rafting and piloted by a man who’s paralyzed. In Idaho, I was hanging out with refugee kids, mostly from Africa and Southeast Asia — part of the “Welcome to America” in Boise is hiking and taking nature walks and getting familiar with all the Americans, all of our neighbors, including the trees and the butterflies. I also met people just in their backyards who maybe don’t have the gear, the car rack, or a subscription to an outdoor magazine, but they know the value of putting their hands in dirt and growing food.You do a lot of really physical outdoor activities in this show — hiking, surfing, rafting, flying a plane! Which was the most challenging?The most challenging by far: sand surfing. Walking in sand, first of all, it’s not fun. That’s a great challenge. I really toned my calves and my glutes and my thighs. So I’m kind of grateful. But trying to ride a board? I don’t do skiing and snowboarding. Trying to stand on frozen water, on an incline, it just feels like … Why would you do that? So then we’re doing it on sand, and there’s no fin on the board. So there’s nothing for it to grip, and so you’re just kind of fishtailing all around. We had so many takes and when you go down a sandy hill, you have to walk back up. There’s no shortcut. It was a lot!Which destinations disrupted your expectations the most?Death Valley was full of life. It was our first shoot and pretty quickly, I was as offended as the Indigenous people by the name because it just sounds barren. The people we spent time with there, they helped me see it differently. The author of “Hiking The Pacific Crest Trail: Southern California,” Shawnté Salabert, took me on this hike to Darwin Falls and it’s just beautiful. I also went running with Mosi Smith, this ultramarathoner, and saw Death Valley through his lens. Of course, being with the Timbisha Shoshone members, who say this place should be called Timbisha, not Death Valley just because some white dude got lost. That’s disrupted expectations just because of what it’s called.There was also a shock for me on Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, with James “Ooker” Eskridge, the mayor of the community. On paper, me and this guy don’t have that much to say to each other. He was in the Trump-iest voting district in America by some measures, and he’s very, very, very conservative. But I had the luxury of spending real time and feeling his energy and experiencing his hospitality. I learned that his home is disappearing due to rising sea levels, due to climate change. He won’t quite call it climate change, but he acknowledges the waters rising and wants to do something about it. He wants sea walls, he wants federal money to be spent to save his town. We were on the coast of his island and seeing tombstones in the water. You can show data about climate change and you could watch an Al Gore presentation and see the temperature going up. But then you can wade through a graveyard. Hearing him describe having to exhume his ancestor to his own backyard; he got emotional talking about it. It made it real. I didn’t expect to have that experience at all. I definitely didn’t expect to have it with someone who’s seemingly so different from me.Climate change comes up a lot in the show. Was that your intention?Making a show about the outdoors is making a show about climate change. We can’t avoid the topic. In every location, I was witness to the effects of climate change: the dryness and lack of water in Death Valley beyond what’s expected; the firefighter training for those wildland firefighters; in Idaho, the smoke from Western fires, and the low levels of the river and the high temperatures of the river. In Minnesota, the premise of one of our segments with the Abbas family, the farming family, was trying to breed climate-resilient trees that can bear higher temperatures, because the forest we were standing in is going to disappear. And so rather than just mourn that, what kind of new forest can we create in its place? They’re engineering just through basic biology to harden the forest so that their kids have trees, too. When we were in Duluth, Minne., we could hardly breathe. Minnesota is having mad fires now. We couldn’t see Lake Superior. I had to wear an N95 mask when we weren’t shooting, because it was burning inside.Everywhere we went, we had a climate story. Sometimes it was more of a focal point of who we were talking with and the story; other times, it just affected how we could make the show.What do you hope people may learn from this show?I want people to see the outdoors as a place where we can literally experience common ground among the wide range of differences that make up this nation. Pretty much everybody should be able to see themselves in the show — we’ve got different time zones, different ecologies, different ages and body shapes and abilities. I hope we’ve reflected the diversity of the nation both in its natural state and in its human state. I want this show to be a mirror for everybody.The Indigenous people I spoke to have a culture of being a part of nature, as opposed to apart from nature. We got to relearn that. That was a really big takeaway for me, especially as the climate gets more volatile in the next decades. We should all stay connected in that way. This is not just something to use. It’s something to belong to.52 Places for a Changed WorldThe 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

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      ‘Women of the White Buffalo’ Review: Speaking Out on the Reservation

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      This documentary sheds light on the destitute conditions in two South Dakota reservations through the stories of the communities’ women.The documentary “Women of the White Buffalo” explores the myriad challenges experienced by Indigenous people on reservations, as well as the historical roots of these social maladies. The story is told through Lakota women living on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations in South Dakota, where rampant alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty and violence threaten the Lakotas’ way of life and future generations.The director Deborah Anderson features first-person interviews with nine women (and one man), ranging in age from 10 to 98, who are trying to heal generations of trauma in their communities. And though the film lacks a clear narrative arc, put together, these stories draw a line between the historical genocide and displacement suffered by Indigenous people and the present destitution on reservations.Vandee Khalsa-Swiftbird is a survivor of sex trafficking who now works on behalf of other victims and fosters a young girl whose troubled mother could no longer care for her. Julie Richards founded the nonprofit Mothers Against Meth Alliance after her own daughter became addicted to methamphetamine. And SunRose IronShell is a high school teacher who helps her students process their traumas through art.Children are featured prominently throughout the film, whether riding horses or dancing in traditional garb. This choice helps plant the documentary firmly in the present, illuminating the past but not dwelling on it. Indeed, the Lakota women appear more interested in solutions and in instilling in Native children a sense of self-worth and self-determination. The way forward, they seem to agree, is to return to their spiritual roots. Delacina Chief Eagle, a young woman who became addicted to meth after her brother died, said of her recovery: “I found myself, through my culture, through my family, through the children.”Women of the White BuffaloNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More