NEW YORK — Lorie Lee Sekayumptewa, a former administrator with the Navajo Nation Film Office, remembers seeing Robert Redford at traditional cultural dances at the Hopi village of Hotevilla in New Mexico. It was more than 30 years ago and he was serving as executive producer of the 1991 release “The Dark Wind,” a drama about Navajo life.
Redford stood out for his Hollywood looks and for his un-Hollywood behavior, from his earnest desire to learn more about the tribe’s spiritual knowledge to his visits to the Navajo Nation, where Sekayumptewa’s father served as the dean of students at the tribal college and would show Redford’s movies at the student union building.
“Even at home, he would bring that camera and film home to us, put up a sheet and we would invite our neighbors and the kids and we would all be there in our living room, watching these movies,” the 54-year-old Sekayumptewa, who is Navajo, Hopi and Sac and Fox Nation, said of Redford.
Redford, who died Tuesday at age 89, was hardly the only liberal activist to emerge out of Hollywood, but few matched his knowledge and focus, his humility and dedication. Fellow actors and leaders of the causes he fought for spoke of his unusually deep legacy, his fight for Native Americans and the environment that began at the height of his stardom.
In the mid-1970s, around the same time he was appearing in such blockbusters as “The Sting” and “The Way We Were,” he immersed himself in the emerging environmental movement. He successfully opposed a power plant being built in his adopted state, Utah, and lobbied for the landmark bills the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. He also joined the board of the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, where he remained a guiding force up to his death.
“His legacy was extraordinary,” says NRDC CEO and President Manish Bapna. “One of the things that was most extraordinary about him was that he understood the power of storytelling. He could talk about climate change and the toll it was inflicting on people and communities — the fisherman coping with rising seas, a family fleeing for their lives from a raging wildfire. He would record messages, give talks or speak in front of Congress.”
Bapna last saw Redford a few months ago, when they dined in New York City.
“He chose his words carefully, and every word he said was profound. He said we must continue to find ways to tell stories that reach people,” Bapna said.
Redford had a longtime affinity for the environment. After growing up in Southern California in the 1930s and ‘40s, he was disheartened to see Los Angeles transform after World War II into a mecca of pollution and traffic jams. In the early 1960s, when he came upon Provo Canyon, Utah, during a cross-country motorcycle trip, he was so awed and invigorated by the landscape that he eventually settled in the area.
Entertainers over time have come to identify and, be identified with, a given cause: Harry Belafonte and civil rights, Paul Newman and nuclear disarmament, Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War. Redford, as much as anyone, helped make the environment an issue for the Hollywood elite, whether for Fonda or Julia Louis-Dreyfus or Leonardo DiCaprio, a fellow NRDC board member who called Redford’s death “a huge loss to our community” and cited his legacy an actor and activist.
