American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.”