American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. The nineteen-month occupation began on 20 November 1969 and ended on 11 June 1971. During that year-and-a-half, Native Americans from all over the United States and delegations from around the world visited the island and contributed their resources and good-will to the real and symbolic struggle of the occupation. The spirit of Alcatraz represented both challenge and resistance: challenge to prevailing images of Native Americans as the fading victims of history; resistance to the policies and treatment of Indian individuals and communities in the past and, most important, in the present. As the voices we have invited to speak in this issue tell us, the spirit of Alcatraz has had an important and powerful legacy. What happened in those few months on that small island influenced and reshaped the lives of many native people; they, in turn, acted on that influence, thus reshaping the lives of many others, and so the circle continued. In this way, the ripples that began on Alcatraz Island spread out, washing on the beaches of many lives and many communities, ultimately contributing to the tidal wave of reform that swept across federal Indian policy and launched the self-determination era. The seventeen papers in this issue speak to several aspects of the Alcatraz occupation: (1) the occupation itself—how it happened, what occurred on the island, the U.S. government’s response, why the events there took the course they did; (2) the aftermath and consequences of the occupation—the patterns of American Indian protest after 1969, the impact on federal Indian policy, the responses of individual Native Americans respond, the effect on both reservation and urban Indian communities. Diverse voices are represented in these pages, offering different assessments of the Alcatraz occupation—its meaning and its consequences. What is shared by all of the authors contributing to this volume, native and nonnative alike, is that they grasped the importance of what was happening on “the Rock” twenty-five years ago and they knew these events would change the way we view ourselves and one another.

In the early morning hours of 20 November 1969, eighty-nine American Indians landed on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Identifying themselves as “Indians of All Tribes,” the group claimed the island by “right of discovery” and by the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie which gave Indians the right to unused federal property that had been Indian land previously. Except for a small caretaking staff, Alcatraz Island had been abandoned by the federal government since the early 1960s, when the federal penitentiary was closed. In a press statement, Indians of All Tribes set the tone of the occupation and the agenda for negotiations during the nineteen-month occupation: We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians . . . . [W]e plan to develop on this island several Indian institutions: 1. A CENTER FOR NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES . . . 2. AN AMERICAN INDIAN SPIRITUAL CENTER . . . 3. AN INDIAN CENTER OF ECOLOGY . . . 4. A GREAT INDIAN TRAINING SCHOOL . . . [and] an AMERICAN INDIAN MUSEUM . . . . In the name of all Indians, therefore, we reclaim this island for our Indian nations . . . . We feel this claim is just and proper, and that this land should rightfully be granted to us for as long as the rivers shall run and the sun shall shine. Signed, INDIANS OF ALL TRIBES.

Alcatraz and Wounded Knee 1973 have come to symbolize the revival of Indian fortunes in the late twentieth century, so we hesitate to discuss the realities of the time or to look critically at their actual place in modern Indian history. We conclude that it is better to wrap these events in romantic notions and broker that feeling in exchange for further concessions from the federal government; consequently, we fail to learn from them the hard lessons that will serve us well in leaner times. Activism in the 1950s was sporadic but intense. In 1957, Lumbee people surrounded a Ku Klux Klan gathering in North Carolina and escorted the hooded representatives of white supremacy back to their homes sans weapons and costumes. In 1961, a strange mixture of Six Nations people and non-Indian supporters attempted a citizens’ arrest of the secretary of the interior, and, sometime during this period, a band of “True Utes” briefly took over the agency offices at Fort Duchesne. The only context for these events was the long suffering of small groups of people bursting forth in an incident that illustrated oppression but suggested no answer to pressing problems. In 1964, the “fish-ins” in the Pacific Northwest produced the first activism with an avowed goal; continual agitation in that region eventually resulted in U.S. v. Washington, which affirmed once and for all the property rights of Northwest tribes for both subsistence and commercial fishing. Indians benefited substantially from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the ensuing doctrines concerning the poor, which surfaced in the Economic Opportunity Act and more particularly in its administration. The civil rights movement had roots in a hundred small gatherings of concerned attorneys brought together by Jack Greenberg and Thurgood Marshall to determine the legal and philosophical basis for overturning Plessy v. Ferguson. Concentrating on the concept of equality, a series of test cases involving access to professional education in the border states cut away the unexamined assumption that separate facilities for higher education automatically meant equality of treatment and equality of the substance of education.

It was 1951 when my wife Bobbie and I moved to San Francisco with three hundred dollars in savings and all of our possessions in three suitcases. We rented a tiny apartment and set up housekeeping on the forty-eight dollars per week that I earned after taxes. I endured the mindless racism of being called “chief” and “blanket-assed Indian” on the job, but a year later, at the age of twenty-one, I had passed the state test to become a licensed termite inspector. A decade later, I was vice president and general manager of a major East Bay termite exterminating firm. Those early years in the Bay Area were a period of financial struggle and hard work, but I was on my way to becoming financially successful. In fact, by the late 1960s, I owned my own business, the First American Termite Company; employed fifteen people; lived in a comfortable, suburban house with Bobbie and our three children; and even drove a Cadillac. Nothing would have been easier than assimilating into middle-class America. Not only was assimilation tempting, but it was encouraged in a society that preferred its Indians to be caricatures. There was no easy path “back to the blanket,” as it was termed, but, for my young family, there was reason—and need—to explore my heritage, and theirs. We took trips to the reservation at Red Lake or to Bobbie’s family home on the reservation in Nevada, but these trips were touring excursions among relics of something that was no longer a real and daily part of our lives. Perhaps we would have lost even that much of our past had the times not brought it back to us.

I have always been reluctant to write anything that might be taken as an “insider” piece on Alcatraz and the Indian occupation. To those who have asked for more than just a journalistic rehash of my reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle, I have tried to say, over the years, that the story belongs to the Native Americans who were there and not to a white reporter who came eventually to be resented by at least some of the Indians whom he had once counted as friends on the island. That’s not just liberal guilt or “political correctness” I feel, and I certainly don’t regard it as some kind of racism. It’s just that I know that a number of Native Americans, whether they were on the island or not, would disagree with my perception of the details, and I have never found it worth damaging the significance of the Alcatraz occupation by haggling over my own credentials and memories connected to it. As far as I’m concerned, any Native American who was living at the time and claims to have been on Alcatraz was on Alcatraz. In one sense, anyway, they all were. I remember John Trudell on that cold day in March 1971, when everyone knew it could not last much longer and when the exhilaration of invasion had, in some ways, worn down into the bitterness of exile. “You can be certain we will not leave Alcatraz,” Trudell said, “We have come too far and through too much to start giving land back to the white man.”

It was 5 January 1965 when I left on the Greyhound bus from my home reservation of the Shoshone and Bannock tribes to go to San Francisco. I was a participant in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program, which sent tribal members from their reservations into the major cities of the nation to get work or learn a trade. There were no jobs on the reservation, and the “No Indians or Dogs Allowed” signs had barely been taken down in my home town of Blackfoot, Idaho. Poverty, hardship, and despair had grown to be the way of life on the reservation. As a result of governmental rule, our reservation and people were suffering. I was raised from childhood in an environment of tribal politics. My father was the tribal chairman for a number of years. His resistance to the government’s attempts to steal our water and lands through the Shoshone Nation Land Claims put our whole family in jeopardy. I would help my father write letters to officials to get assistance for our reservation, and it was in this way that I began to understand about the continuing war against our people. It was a very hard time for us all; the 1960s did not bring change. When the BIA offered relocation to the city, I took the opportunity, along with many others who left their reservations. We were not aware that the federal government’s plan to “drop us off” in the cities was another insidious method of depriving us of our reservation lands and membership in our tribes. Some of us knew that non-Indians were exerting intense political pressures to gain more of our lands for their economic benefit.

I was involved in the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz by American Indian students from San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, during the first six months of that event. I was a volunteer instructor in the then-developing Native American studies program at UC Berkeley, and many of the original fourteen who secretly landed on Alcatraz Island on 9 November 1969 were members of my class on American Indian liberation. I am taking the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alcatraz to add some reminiscences and perhaps little-known facts to the story that others are now documenting. As far as I can tell, the first academic article in the United States to be published on this experiment in Indian liberation was mine. It was published in The Journal of Ethnic Studies in 1978 on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Alcatraz landing. Its title was “Free Alcatraz: the Culture of Native American Liberation.” Earlier, in the spring of 1970, I had read a draft of this article before the Northwest Anthropological Association meeting in Oregon. It is interesting to note that anthropologists, who for so long have billed themselves as experts on things Indian, totally ignored this historic event. Although my graduate work was in anthropology at UC Berkeley, my personal association and ethnic loyalties lay with the Native American community, so I made certain that the Indians of All Tribes (as the occupiers called themselves) reviewed my paper and gave me their feedback before I read it at the anthropology meeting.

One weakness that I have had as an anthropologist has been a failure to make plans for the possibility that someone might ask me details about my life twenty-five years later. I am in the habit of keeping my research (problem-oriented attention to important people doing important things) separate from my life (my day-to-day activities); so, even when I was in the midst of important historical events, I never thought that my part in them was worth describing for posterity. Thus, on this occasion of remembering and memorializing a watershed in the history of Native American survival and resistance, I have only a few random notes to help me organize my memory of my participation in the events of Alcatraz and before. Much was happening at that time, and I found myself willy-nilly in a position to be a small part of processes that I did not know would be as important as hindsight shows. Actually, in order to get a good picture of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, we have to go back to the first occupation, in 1964, and follow the threads through the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State University (then College). When Alcatraz was decommissioned as a federal prison, the property entered into an administrative limbo that threatened to inspire lawyers and frustrate developers. Contemplation of this administrative limbo also inspired some Lakota residents in the Bay Area to examine documents relating to Lakota-U.S. government relations. Convinced that the wording in certain parts of the Great Sioux Treaty of 1868 and the Indian Allotment Act of 1887 supported their claims, five Lakota men went to the island and formally staked their claims; after four hours, they returned to the mainland to pursue their legal cases.

With bittersweet fondness, I recall my grandmother’s gift of a white shirt and a tie she thought I would need to attend college in the late 1960s. How could she have known? No one in my family had ever graduated from high school, let alone attempted college. I still clearly remember my only visit to a high school counselor who was perplexed by this skinny, dark-skinned youth who kept enrolling in college prep courses. “Don’t you understand that you will never get into a fraternity? Why not take auto shop?” At that time, I did not even know what a fraternity was. Being stubborn and determined to become an architect, I persisted and finally enrolled in the huge, somewhat intimidating University of California at Riverside (about three thousand students). I felt uncomfortable and isolated in the classroom, as most Indian students still feel today. As a result, I withdrew into the last row and cocooned myself in a blanket of uncommunicative silence. I spent my entire undergraduate career without Native American peers or role models. There were no staff, counselors, or faculty with whom I could share my self-doubts or my anxious dreams for the future. Because the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had administratively decided not to make higher education scholarships available to California Indians, I was denied support. Consequently, I worked two and sometimes three jobs, year round, to earn money to pay for my education.

INTRODUCTION The liberation of Alcatraz Island by Native Americans in November 1969 occurred when I had just started teaching newly developed courses in our brand-new Native American studies program at the University of California, Davis. I was engaged in the political work of securing additional teaching positions, writing up a major, setting up a student community center (Tecumseh Center), securing adequate space, and all of the other things needed to bring our dreams to reality. I had just moved to Davis from Berkeley in July, and my energy was focused on prying resources loose from administrators and crossing swords with faculty committees. Several of our Davis students went down to Alcatraz immediately, and some of my fellow members of United Native Americans were among the leaders of the Alcatraz community. I began to realize the unique importance of Alcatraz, even though I personally was only a supporter and visitor, never an occupier. Alcatraz was perhaps the first Indian-controlled “free” piece of real estate within the United States since the whites had conquered southwestern Colorado and southwestern Utah in 1910–15 and assumed control over interior Alaska during the same general period. One thing that made Alcatraz so significant was the fact that, when you left the pier, you left the United States and soon arrived on a native-ruled island, temporarily beyond the jurisdiction of any white authorities. Another significant aspect of Alcatraz was that it liberated the psyche of native peoples, making it “all right to be Indian, headbands and all.” Finally, it was an experiment in native self-determination in a communal and political sense.

The occupation of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay on 14 November 1969 was one of the most significant events for American Indians in contemporary history. It spawned a movement that has touched the lives of many in the indigenous community and has resulted in many dramatic changes. The occupation has been called a defining moment in American Indian protest, heralding the beginning of the Red Power movement, but I personally believe it was more than that. It set the stage for the spiritual rebirth of the original peoples of this land, and it was the beginning of the reclaiming of pride and dignity for all Indian nations in the Western Hemisphere. Twenty-five years later, this movement has proven to be the catalyst that released the voices of indigenous people. My spiritual journey to Alcatraz began three years before the occupation, when I was a student athlete at Window Rock High School in Fort Defiance, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. One of the high points of my youth was an invitation to participate in a major league baseball tryout camp conducted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in July 1966 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was given very good ratings as a prospect to play professional baseball. For the next two years, 1967–69, I was a member of the Arizona Western College baseball team in Yuma and played in one of the toughest junior college baseball conferences in the country.

I found myself once again leaving my beloved Indian reservation that blustery March morning, but an unspoken realization that my circle would soon be complete carried me forward. After saying the proper and sometimes emotional farewells to my family and the mountains, I climbed into the van and headed eastward across the rolling prairie to New York City. Seeking a positive way in which to occupy the many traveling hours ahead, the historian in me began to record my perceptions and thoughts and to describe the beauty of our spectacular country. After a few hundred miles and many hours of constructing this journal, a theme began to emerge. As various sites and geological features passed the van’s windows, I noted and commented on them and fitted them into the grand scheme of things. For example, down the road are two rocks that have been moved to their present site from what is called the Cree (Indian) Crossing of the Milk River. They are shaped like kneeling buffalo and are part of a larger distant group. The sign by the road says “Sleeping Buffalo Rock.” They are now considered sacred, and Indian people stop there and pray. Further on are the two Porcupine Creek names that figured in determining the boundaries of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation long ago. Later, I passed the Garrison Dam, which flooded Indian land on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Later still, I passed the Red River of the north, as well as the Sauk Centre, the Missouri River, Illinois, and so on; these names and places are filled with past and present Indian history. It became obvious that Indian people have been here a long time and that we have left our proud imprint upon the face of this continent. As I considered these things, it occurred to me that the eyes and mind that were observing these things now were not always so filled with Indian history and the pride such things evoke. Long ago, I was a markedly different person.

Alcatraz, a twenty-two-and-one-half-acre island situated in the bay between San Francisco and Sausalito, California, became an issue to American Indians in November 1969 when a group of Indians landed at the vacant federal penitentiary and claimed title to the island under the doctrine of “right of discovery.” On Sunday afternoon, 9 November 1969, fifty American Indians circled Alcatraz twice on a borrowed Canadian clipper ship, the Monte Cristo. Five men dove off and swam to Alcatraz Island to claim it. Originally, seventy-five Indians had planned to land on the island from five pleasure boats, but the plan failed when the armada did not show up. Richard Oakes got the urge to dive into the water from the Monte Cristo, and the other four followed. Walter Hatch was unable to finish the difficult swim, but the others made it to shore. When they emerged from the water, they were greeted by island employee Glen Dodson, who asked them to leave; they left ten minutes later. That same evening, the same four Indians, plus ten more, returned to Alcatraz on the Butchie Bee and landed around 6:00 p.m. The fourteen Indians were students from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and San Francisco State College.

We will not ever get anything till we make Alcatraz. Leslie Marmon Silko wrote that the Hopi deliberately chose an austere physical environment in which to anchor themselves. The high mesas compel the people to come together repeatedly in labor, ceremony, and prayer for the common good. The physical environment, once learned, allowed a Hopi place to evolve across more than seven centuries. If one were to make a list of other sites in North America as seemingly untenable as the Hopi mesas, Alcatraz Island would have to be written at the top of that list. So difficult is the place that the only long-term attempt to live there was made by those society outcasts deemed too dangerous to live elsewhere, and their overseers. Yet, as foreboding as a site might be, Silko believes that until a viable and balanced relationship to place is found, a people cannot truly be said to have emerged. Place and human identity must be invested in each other for ethnogenesis to occur. In his own effort to identify an Indian sense of place, N. Scott Momaday has named this achievement, “reciprocal appropriation,” wherein humans invest themselves in place while simultaneously incorporating place into fundamental experience. Moreover, he says, it requires a “moral act of the imagination.”

The two F4-B Phantom jets came in low, very low, at about two hundred feet, probably traveling at somewhere around five hundred miles per hour. Five hundred was just cruising speed for these birds. I had seen them go faster in Vietnam. I had seen them twist and turn and hurl fiery death toward the ground in the form of 250-, 500-, and 1,000-pound bombs. They were, as we say in the Blackfeet, stoonatopsi, dangerous. For the twenty months I had spent as a support combat engineer with the First Marine Air Wing on the outskirts of the Vietnamese city of DaNang, the sleek killing machines had been on my side. Now they were not on my side; now they were hunting me. In 1969, native militants took over the abandoned prison island of Alcatraz to call attention to the destitute conditions of the natives of America. After a year-and-a-half on the island, living in primitive conditions, the natives were forced to leave their watery fortress. A fire had been lighted, however; the protests were just beginning. On 27 February 1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM), in concert with a grassroots political activist group called the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, took armed control of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Alcatraz was the call to arms. There were other marches, protests, walks across the country to keep the native movement visible, but Wounded Knee was the crucible that formed many of today’s native leaders, whether or not they were at the siege. At Wounded Knee, those who chose to come told white America, “We might not be able to live like our ancestors, but, when push comes to shove, we can still die like our ancestors, die in the Indian way, defending our homeland and our people.”

INTRODUCTION Several times when I have served on a panel discussing gender or racial role expectations, the moderator has introduced me by asking the audience to guess which one of the panel members is a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). If no one knows me, no one chooses me. I am the small strawberry blonde, blue-eyed, middle-aged woman wearing a black, dressed-for-success suit accessorized with (fake) pearl earrings and choker. Appearances can also be deceptive where social groups are involved. For example, the view that some people hold of AIM as a violent organization and the belief that its actions are nonproductive or even counterproductive serve as more examples of faulty perception based on stereotypes. The argument I will make in the next pages is based on personal experience and is not meant to be a comprehensive sociological treatise, albeit sociology is my professional area and certainly has shaped my personal view of the world. In addition, I grew up in Montana and, as a twenty-one-year-old bride, moved to the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Reservation in 1958. My home is still there. My son and my ex-husband still live there. Thus, both my professional training and my almost forty years of firsthand experience of reservation life have shaped my personal analysis of the impact of AIM. Based on this grounded perspective, I will argue that AIM was a primary facilitator in bringing rapid change as well as empowerment to many native people and communities. Until AIM was established, change in many areas of Indian Country had moved at such a slow pace that improvements in social conditions and alleviation of human suffering were, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent to both its residents and to the general public’s eye. AIM created a broad-based public awareness that helped to open long-closed doors and enabled major personal and institutional change.

The reality is a continuum which connects Indian flesh sizzling over Puritan fires and Vietnamese flesh roasting under American napalm. The reality is the compulsion of a sick society to rid itself of men like Nat Turner and Crazy Horse, George Jackson and Richard Oakes, whose defiance uncovers the hypocrisy of a declaration affirming everyone’s right to liberty and life. The reality is an overwhelming greed which began with the theft of a continent and continues with the merciless looting of every country on the face of the earth which lacks the strength to defend itself. —Richard Lundstrom In combination with the fishing rights struggles of the Puyallup, Nisqually, Muckleshoot, and other nations in the Pacific Northwest from 1965 to 1970, the 1969–71 occupation of Alcatraz Island by the San Francisco area’s Indians of All Tribes coalition ushered in a decade-long period of uncompromising and intensely confrontational American Indian political activism. Unprecedented in modern U.S. history, the phenomenon represented by Alcatraz also marked the inception of a process of official repression of indigenous activists without contemporary North American parallel in its virulence and lethal effects.

INTRODUCTION There has been a resurgence in Native American population and culture in the past two decades. From a probable population of about twelve million people on the North American continent at the arrival of Columbus, native populations declined remarkably, so that, by 1920, the U.S. census estimated less than 250,000 people. The genocidal horrors practiced on native populations by the descendants of invading Europeans from the 1850s through the 1920s made being an “Indian” during those years a humiliating and dangerous experience. Many of those who survived changed their names to Anglo labels, abandoned their religious faiths, and tried to fit in to the society of the conquerors. For generations, people denied their native heritage to their children, as so many European immigrants have done on their arrival on the North American shores. Some Native Americans who apparently were successful at assimilation wrote of their experiences with painful ambivalence. Ohiyesa, a Santee Dakota who transformed himself from a hunter to a physician, wrote six books from 1902 to 1916. A review of his works reveals several permutations in his life, primarily from an acceptance of the social Darwinism so popular at the time of his earliest writings to a deeper appreciation for his native culture and religion as he became critical of the agendas of the dominant society. A contemporary of Ohiyesa, Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota, appreciated his native culture and wrote prolifically about it; nevertheless, in the closing passages of his 1928 work, he literally begs the white man to “give the Indian a chance” at assimilation. These passages are depressing. Those were sorrowful times for American Indians.