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.

On 11 June 1971, twenty-five years ago, U.S. government forces reoccupied Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, ending the Indian occupation of the island that had begun on 20 November 1969. The removal force consisted of ten FBI agents, along with United States marshals from the San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Diego offices, armed with handguns, M-1 thirty-caliber carbines, and shotguns. Supporting the marshals were the federal protective officers, a group that had been formed in April 1971 as a security arm of the GSA. These officers were equipped with radio transceivers, thirty-eight-caliber revolvers and ammunition, helmets, batons, and flashlights. Only fifteen Indians remained on the island to face this formidable force: six men, four women, and five children. The nineteen-month occupation came to an end. The impact of the Alcatraz occupation went beyond the individual lives and consciousnesses it helped to reshape, however. The events on Alcatraz marked the beginning of a national Indian activist movement, sometimes referred to as ”Red Power,” that kept national attention on Indian rights and grievances. The founding of Deganawidah Quetzalcoatl University (DQU) in California, the Trail of Broken Treaties, the takeovers of the BIA, the siege at Wounded Knee, the Longest Walk-all of these followed in the wake of Alcatraz.

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.

Suicide among American Indian youth is a matter of serious concern to members of all Indian tribal organizations across the nation and is an important issue confronting the human services professions today. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among American Indian youths fifteen to nineteen years of age, with a rate 2.7 times (37.1 per 100,000) that of youth of all races in the United States, and the fourth leading cause of death among American Indian youth ages five through fourteen, with a rate 2.8 times (2.5 per 100,000)higher than that of all races in the United States. Within the Indian youth suicide group, American Indian children placed in non-Indian homes for adoptive or foster care suffer a rate of seventy suicides per 100,000, six times higher than that of other youth in the United States. While suicide rates for youths fourteen through nineteen years old have decreased somewhat, rates for ten and fourteen year olds are approximately four times higher than that for the general U.S. population and have continued to increase steadily. In 1987 Irving N. Berlin reported, “there are considerable data to indicate that the more than 50,000 American Indian children adoptees in Anglo homes are at considerable risk.” A host of issues are germane to suicide trends. These include data vital to the planning of intervention programs for age groups most at risk, pattern variations among tribes, and common associate factors that include alcoholism, arrest careers, and interpersonal distress such as anomie, helplessness, hopelessness, and despair. American Indian suicide first came to public attention in 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy visited an intermountain Indian reservation. On the day of his visit, the community had suffered the loss of an Indian youth by suicide, and thus Indian suicide was a major topic of conversation.