“The Godfather” Turns down an Oscar for Native American Rights
Like any DePietro family gathering, my family watched Italian mafia movies over the thanksgiving break (the Irishman on Netflix) and it got me poking around the internet. I came upon something really intriguing in my random google search. Apparently, in 1973, Marlon Brando (known for his role as Vito – the mob boss – in The Godfather, Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and other famous roles in History) turned down an Oscar award in order to raise awareness about Native American rights. He boycotted the Oscar award ceremony and sent Apache actress Sacheen Littefeather in his place. In front of a massive audience, she said:
“I’m representing Marlon Brando this evening and he has asked me to tell you … that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry —”
Here is the article that I read, and that could be shown to students.
This event got me thinking about how celebrities use their power to make statements about social justice concerns. We often hear about Colin Kapernick (the NFL) for his social justice work concerning the Black Lives Matter movement or Leonardo DiCaprio for his work in environmental justice – but seldom do we see HUGE acts like TURNING DOWN AN OSCAR.
It would be interesting to have students read this article and maybe do a little research about celebrities with social justice agendas.
Students could even write a letter to a celebrity, imploring them to take action in a SJ field of interest (language of persuasion).
What do you guys think?
Any other ideas?
Thanks, Kate… I have seen this video. When I watched it in the past what I remember is how uncomfortable and shocked I felt by the reaction of the audience that was booing her! I like your idea of introducing the angle of how people with influence can promote social justice agendas and having students write letters. I think you could also look at the imbalance of diversity in various industries using the film industry as a starting point. I found this document, “Inequality in 1,200 Popular Films:Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2007 to 2018” (http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-inequality-report-2019-09-03.pdf) It addresses inequalities in different categories and has some great visual aides. There is an interesting chart on the bottom of page 16 (the 22nd page of the document) that shows the distribution of prevalence of characters by racial categories between 2007 and 2018… (I tried to post a picture of it here, but I’m not sure how )

yep… I can’t post the chart here, LOL
Hi Kate,
I have its video actually on one of the youtube links on my race PPTs. It’s under cultural appropriation. I didn’t have time to show it in the class But here it is just in casE: https://www.pbs.org/video/what-is-cultural-appropriation-e6dryc/
Thanks for bringing this event to our attention!
Jeanne – this is a very interesting and useful report! I can’t wait to read it! Thanks for sharing!
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