Indigenous Resistance--Alcatraz Occupation and #NoDPLN at Standing Rock. |
Note: The
ongoing struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux with the united support a Native
Nations across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America as well as indigenous people
from across the globe to stop Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and irreparable damage to the Missouri River
drainage is just the largest and most recent of ongoing attempts of Native
peoples to reassert their rights since their military conquest was completed
within a few years of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Among the most dramatic of these episodes was
the seizure of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
Here is that important story.
On
the face of it the property was not very attractive. In fact it had serious issues. Stuck in the
middle of San Francisco Bay it was typically damp and cold, shrouded often by that famous
fog. Access by
boat from the shore was difficult and inconvenient. The property was largely occupied by hulking, ugly
abandon buildings sinking rapidly
into disrepair and perhaps haunted by generations of human sufferings that had gone on within their
walls.
None-the-less,
on November 20, 1969 a rag-tag and barely organized group of Native Americans, most of them local college students, dodged Coast Guard boats to land on Alcatraz Island and claim it in the name of all Indian people by virtue of the Right of Discovery and provisions of the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 which reserved the right of the Native
Nations to claim all unused and surplus Federal Government
property.
Alcatraz Island including the Coast Guard Light House and the abandoned Federal Prison cell block and out buildings. |
Alcatraz
certainly fit that bill. The rugged
island named for the pelicans
that roosted there by the Spanish
came into the possession of the United States Government after the Mexican War. A costal
defense fortification was erected and garrisoned in the 1850’s. Not
long after, the first operational light house on the West Coast was built on its high
point. During the Civil War the Fort doubled as a prison for
the first time housing Confederate sympathizers
and agents, and the crews of Rebel privateers captured by the Navy. After the war the defenses were considered obsolete and the facility became an official military prison in 1868
housing soldiers convicted of crimes
and deserters. Later some Native American “renegades” were also detained there beginning with some Hopi men in the 1870’s. After the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906 civilian prisoners from the city were transferred there for safe
keeping.
Designated
as the main Army prison for the West
Coast, an enormous new modern,
multiple story cell block was erected over the subterranean first floor of the former citadel and opened in 1912. During World War I Draft evaders and conscientious objectors joined the
military offenders. The military prison
was decommissioned in 1933 and
transferred to the Department of
Justice. The following year the Bureau of Prison re-opened it as maximum security facility housing prisoners who continuously caused trouble at other federal prisons. Among
its inmates was a who’s who of hardened criminals including Al Capone—slipping rapidly into syphilis induced dementia—George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Bumpy Johnson, Puerto Rican Nationalist Rafael Cancel Miranda, Mickey
Cohen, Arthur “Doc” Barker, James “Whitey” Bulger, and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis.
There
were no successful attempts to escape the island, although several men
died trying either by being shot in the
attempt or drowning in the
treacherous waters of the Bay. Shortly
after a particularly bloody botched mass
escape attempt in 1962, Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the prison shut down and most of its prisoners transferred to the new maximum security prison at Marion, Illinois in 1963.
The
island was soon deserted except for
the Coast Guard lighthouse. Its
buildings had been rapidly deteriorating
for years in the damp, salty conditions
of the bay. Without constant attention
they quickly got worse. Although the old
prison became something of a tourist
attraction, with tour boats
circling it, the government had no clear
plans for its future use.
It
first attracted the attention of
local Indian activists in 1964. On March
8 of that year 40 Sioux activists
led by Richard McKenzie, Mark Martinez, Garfield Spotted Elk, Virgil
Standing-Elk, Walter Means, and Allen Cottie occupied the island for
four hours, laying symbolic claim to
it under the Fort Laramie treaty but generously
offering to pay the government 47 cents per acre or $9.40 for the entire island,
the same price offered Red Cloud for
the vast tracks of land ceded in the
1868 treaty.
The
idea continued to percolate in the
Native American activist community, especially at Bay Area campuses where Indian students began organizing inspired by the Civil Rights Movement.
The iconic image of the occupation by Ilka Hartman--young Native Americans raise the Red Power fist salute on the Alcatraz docks. |
Adam Fortunate Eagle, a 40 year old Ojibwa first conceived of a new occupation of Alcatraz. He encountered Richard Oakes, a 30 year old Mohawk
who had helped found the Native American
Studies Department at San Francisco State University, at a party.
The two, soon joined by Shoshone
Bannock LaNada Means, head of the Native
American Student Organization at the University
of California, Berkeley, began
to plan another occupation and Oaks recruited
students from groups on several campuses.
On
November 9, 1969 boats that were
supposed to transport demonstrators to the island failed to appear. Fortunate
Eagle somehow convinced the owner of the
sailing yacht Monte Cristo, then giving tours
of the Bay, to take on the protestors and sail by Alcatraz Island. Oakes, Cherokee
Jim Vaughn, Inuit Joe Bill, Ho-Chunk Ross Harden, and Jerry Hatch jumped overboard, swam to
shore, and claimed the island by right of discovery. They were quickly removed by the Coast Guard but later that day 14 others made it to the island and
managed to camp out overnight before
being ejected. When Fortunate Eagle
presented an official document to
the General Services Administration
(GSA) in San Francisco that day demanding that the island be turned over to
the United Tribes it made headlines across the country.
Organizers
then began planning a permanent
occupation.
That
effort was launched in the pre-dawn
hours of November 20 and involved 79 native activists, most of them
students but also including some married
couples and six children. An alerted Coast Guard prevented most of
the small boats transporting them from landing but 14 made it to shore
including Oakes, Means, Bill, and David Leach, John Whitefox, Ross Harden,
Jim Vaughn, Linda Arayando, Vernell
Blindman, Kay Many Horse, John Virgil, John Martell, Fred Shelton,
and Rick Evening.
Blackfoot longshoreman Joseph Morris, rented space on Pier 40 to transport supplies and people to the island. |
This
time no effort was made to dislodge the
occupiers and despite the harassment
of the Coast Guard over the next several days the number of occupiers swelled.
Some of these early arrivals played key
roles as events played out. Blackfoot
Joe Morris was a member of the Longshoremen’s
Union, a group with a long, storied,
and proud radical heritage. He was instrumental in having the union announce that it would launch a general strike of the docks if attempts were made to remove the Indians. This was an excellent insurance policy. He
also later rented space on Pier 40 to facilitate the transportation of supplies and people to the island.
Sioux John
Trudell quickly became a public
spokesman of the movement and began broadcasting
Radio Free Alcatraz, daily
reports to the Berkley campus FM radio station.
Cleo Watterman, a Seneca, was President of the San
Francisco American Indian Center, and stayed
on shore to organize broader support
and to help collect and forward supplies and provisions as the population on the
island grew.
Grace Thorpe, the daughter of legendary athlete Jim Thorpe, used her wide connections with Hollywood celebrities, to drum up star power support. She was aided by jazz singer Kay Starr, and Iroquois
born on a Dougherty, Oklahoma reservation. Jane Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Marlon Brando,
Jonathan Winters, Cree Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Dick Gregory were all enlisted to visit the island and show their support. Thorpe also personally donated a generator,
water barge, and an ambulance service to the island. She was instrumental in getting a $15,000
donation from Credence Clearwater Revival
which was used to purchase the Clearwater which provided reliable, safe service to the
island.
A highlight of the early period of the
occupation occurred on November 27, when the first Unthanksgiving was thrown attracting
hundreds of day visitors. Two days later
a sympathetic Bureau of Indian Affairs employee,
Doris Purdy came and shot a short film.
President
Richard Nixon appointed
his Special Counsel, Leonard Garment to take over negotiations from the GSA. He was instructed to concede nothing on the Indian claims under Treaties and to try and get them off the island without provoking a
crisis. Talks were not successful.
Meanwhile
sympathy for the occupation was rising. Press coverage was generally positive.
Mohawk Richard Oakes was one of the planners of the occupation and a key leader in the early days withdrew after his 13 year old daughter died in a fall from a wall. |
However
after the first of the year, things began to deteriorate on the island.
On January 3 Richard Oakes’s 13 year old stepdaughter Anne fell to her death from a wall. The heartbroken Oakes and his wife Yvonne withdrew from the island leaving
something of a leadership vacuum
which Means, Trudell, and Stella Leach
strove to fill. Means, who was more
comfortable with the press than many of the others, became the most publicly visible spokesperson for the movement,
although she soon found herself facing
internal discord.
Several
of the original occupiers departed to
return to school. Meanwhile the
population, which at one point reached nearly 400, swelled with many of the
Native American homeless, including
those with drinking and drug abuse problems. Incidents of violence
between residents increased as did harassment
and sexual attacks on some women.
White supporters had been
welcome, but several street freaks moved
in brining increased drug use. Leaders tried to counter with increased self-policing and a ban on non-Indians staying overnight.
Bob Robertson, a Republican working for an outfit called
the National Council on Indian
Opportunity arrived in January.
Means and some of the others thought he was an unofficial emissary from Nixon authorized to conduct back channel negotiations. He proposed turning the island over to the National
Park Service with a promise that some kind of Indian Cultural center and continued
access for events. This was entirely unsatisfactory to almost
everyone, but Means met privately with
him and three lawyers to solicit a $500,000
grant to renovate facilities on the Island.
Robertson considered the attempt extortion
and some of the other Native leaders suspected Means was fishing for a sinecure administrating
the grant. Robertson turned down the
proposal and left the island.
Means
also hoped that if the United Tribes could secure a top-notch, high profile lawyer to sue the Federal Government for
possession of the Island under the provisions of the Fort Laramie treaty, they
would have a good chance to succeed. She began traveling from the island to raise funds for such a suit and to
look for a hot-shot lawyer to take
the case. In here absence rumors circulated, including that she
had been offered a screen test and a
movie contract.
Trudell
and the occupiers local lawyers objected to Means’ plans. The majority of occupiers backed
Trudell. Means and many of her
supporters withdrew from the island.
Sensing the
discord
on the Island, in May the government stepped
up pressure by turning off electricity and water service and increasing harassment
of supply boats. Living conditions on the island began
to deteriorate rapidly.
The warden's house, the keepers' quarters and other buildings burned under suspicious circumstances, undermining public support. |
In
early June fires of suspicious origins
destroyed four historic buildings on the Island. Footage of black smoke drifting over the Bay
made for dramatic television and the
previously sympathetic press began turning
on the occupiers. Numbers on the
Island began dwindling down to a hard
core.
On
June 11, 1971, a large force of
government officers removed the remaining
15 people from the island. Despite
the problems the occupation lasted 19
months and inspired a wave of more
than 200 acts of Native American civil
disobedience, including an attempted take-over of an abandoned Nike missile site a few days later by
some of the occupiers.
They
also raised public sympathy for the Native American rights and land
claims. They have been credited with influencing the shift in administrative
policies away from away from termination
of reservations and toward recognition
Indian autonomy. Leaders of
subsequent actions including the Trail
of Broken Treaties, seizure of the Mayflower replica, the BIA Washington Headquarters occupation,
the Wounded Knee incident, and the Longest Walk were all inspired by the
Alcatraz example.
In
1972 Alcatraz became a National
Recreation area and received designation as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. Today, the island’s facilities
are managed by the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Park Service interpreters include discussion
of the occupation on their tours and signs of it still remain.
And
every year Native Americans hold and Unthanksgiving dinner on Alcatraz.
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