 | The Cavalier daily February 9, 1970 |  |
Alcatraz: 'Keep Off Indian Property'
When fourteen Indian college
students invaded Alcatraz on a
cold, foggy morning in the first part
of November - claiming ownership
"by right of discovery," and citing
an 1868 treaty allowing the Sioux
possession of unused federal lands
- they seemed in a light-hearted
mood. After establishing their
beachhead, they told the press that
they had come there because
Alcatraz already had all the
necessary features of a reservation:
dangerously uninhabitable
buildings; no fresh water;
inadequate sanitation; and the
certainty of total unemployment.
They said they were planning to
make the five full-time caretakers
wards of a Bureau of Caucasian
Affairs, and offered to take this
troublesome real estate off the
white man's hands for $24, payment
to be made in glass beads. The
newspapers played it up big, calling
the Indians a "raiding party."
When, after a 19-hour stay, the
Indians were persuaded to leave the
been a good publicity stunt.
Not Joking
If the Indians had ever been
joking about Alcatraz, however, it
was with the bitter irony that fills
colonial subjects' discourse with the
mother-country. When they
returned to the mainland, they
didn't fall back into the cigar-store
stoicism that is supposedly the red
man's prime virtue. In fa their
first invasion ignited a series of
meetings and strategy-sessions; two
weeks later they returned to the
rock, this time with a force of
nearly 100 persons, a supply
network, and the clear intention of
staying. What had begun as a way
of drawing attention to the position
of the contemporary Indian,
developed into a plan for doing
something about it. And when the
government, acting through the
General Services Administration,
gave them a deadline for leaving,
the Indians replied with demands of
their own: Alcatraz was theirs, they
said, and it would take U.S.
Marshals to remove them and their
families; they planned to turn the
island into a major cultural center
and research facility; they would
negotiate only the mechanics of
deeding over the land, and that
only with Interior Secretary Walter
Hickel during a face to face
meeting. The Secretary never
showed up, but the government's
deadlines were withdrawn.
Indian Territory
Alcatraz is Indian territory: The
old warning to "Keep Off U.S.
Property" now reads "Keep Off
Indian Property," security guards
with red armbands stand near the
docks to make sure it is obeyed.
Women tend first beneath huge iron
cauldrons filled with food, while
their kids play Frisbee in what was
once a convicts' exercise yard.
Some of the men work on the
prison's wiring system or try to get
more cell blocks cleared out for the
Indian people who are arriving daily
from all over the country; others sit
fishing on the wharf with
hand-lines, watching quietly as the
rip-tides churn in the Bay. During
the day, rock music plays over
portable radios and a series of soap
operas flit across a TV; at night, the
prison is filled with the soft sounds
of ceremonial drums and
songs in Sioux, Kiowa and Navajo.
In the few weeks of its
occupation, Alcatraz has become a
mecca, a sort of red man's Selma.
Indian people come, stay a few
days, and then leave, taking with
them a sense of wonderment that it
has happened. Middle-aged
"establishment" Indians are there.
They mix with younger insurgents
like Lehman Brightman (the
militant Sioux who heads a red
power organization called the
United Native Americans).
Mad-Bear Anderson (the Iroquois
traditionalist from upstate New
York who fought to get the United
Nations to stop the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers' flooding of
precious Seneca Indian lands). Sid
Mills (the young Yakima who
demanded a discharge from the
Army after returning from
Viet-Nam so that he could fight his
real war against the state of
Washington's denial of his people's
fishing rights), and Al Bridges (one
of the leaders of the first
Washington fish-ins in 1964, who
now faces a possible ten-year prison
sentence for defying the state Fish
and Game Commission). The
composition of the ad hoc Indian
community changes constantly, but
the purpose remains the same: to
make Alcatraz a powerful symbol
of liberation springing out of the
long American imprisonment.
Sense of Urgency
The people enjoy themselves,
spending a lot of time sitting
around the campfire talking and
gossiping. But there is a sense of
urgency beneath the apparent
lassitude. Richard Oakes, a
17-year-old Mohawk who worked
in high steel construction before
coming West to go to college, is one
of the elected spokesmen. Sitting at
a desk in the old Warden's Office,
he talks about the hope of
beginning a new organization, the
Confederacy of American Indian
Nations, to weld Indian groups all
over the country into one body
capable of taking power away from
the white bureaucracy. He
acknowledges that the pan-Indian
movements which have sprung up
before have always been crushed.
"But time is running out for us," he
says. "We have everything at stake.
And if we don't make it now, then
we'll get trapped at the bottom of
that white world out there, and
wind up as some kind of Jack Jones
with a social security number and
that's all. Not just on Alcatraz, but
everyplace else, the Indian is in his
last stand for cultural survival."
'Better Red Than Dead'
This sentiment is reflected in the
slogans lettered on walls all over the
prison, the red paint bleeding down
onto the concrete. One of them
The Alcatraz occupation is still
popularly regarded as the engaging
fun and games of Indian college
kids. In its news coverage of the
U.S. Coast Guard's feeble attempt
to blockade ships running supplies
to the island, one local television
station found amusement in
showing their films to the musical
accompaniment of U.S. Cavalry
bugle calls. It was not so amusing to
the occupiers, however. The
California Indians now on the Rock
know that their people were
decimated from a population of
100,000 in 1850 when the gold
rush settlers arrived, to about
15,000 thirty years later, and that
whole tribes, languages and cultures
were erased from the face of the
earth. There are South Dakota
Indians there whose grandparents
were alive in 1890 when several
hundred Sioux, mostly women and
children leaving the reservation to
find food, were caught at Wounded
Knee, killed, and buried in a
common grave the old
daguerreotypes still showing
heavily-mustachioed soldiers
standing stiffly over the frozen
bodies like hunters with their
trophies. Cowboys and Indians is
not a pleasant game for the
Alcatraz Indians and some must
wonder whether, in another 150
years, German children will be gaily
playing Nazis and Jews.
But the past is not really at
issue. What is at stake today, as
Richard Oakes says, is cultural
survival. Some of the occupiers
have known Indian culture all their
lives; some have been partially
assimilated away from it and are
now trying "to return. All
understand that it is in jeopardy,
and they want some assurance that
Indian-ness will be available to their
children. It sounds like a fair
request, but fairness has never ruled
the destiny of the Indian in
America. In fighting for survival,
the Indians of Alcatraz are
challenging the lies perpetuated by
anthropologists and bureaucrats
alike, who insist that the red man is
two things: an incompetent "ward"
addicted to the paternalism of
government, and an anachronism
whose past is imprisoned in white
history and whose only future is as
an invisible swimmer in the
American mainstream. The people
on Alcatraz have entered a struggle
on a large scale that parallels the
smaller, individual struggles for
survival that many of them have
known themselves; it is the will to
exist as individuals that brought
them together in determination to
exist as a people.
Strangled in bureaucracy,
swindled out of lands, forcibly
alienated from his own culture, the
Indian continues to be victimized
by the white man's symbolism: he
has been both loved and hated to
death. On the one hand, the white
looked out at him from his own
constricted universe of acquisition
and grasping egocentrism and saw a
Noble Savage, an innocent at peace
with his world. Here was a relic of a
better time, to be protected and
preserved. But on the other hand
the white saw an uncivilized
creature possessing, but not
exploiting, great riches; the vision
was conjured up of the Murdering
Redskin whose bestiality provided
the justification for wiping him out
and taking his land. The Indian's
"plight" has always inspired
recurrent orgies of remorse, but
never has it forced us to digest the
implications of a nation and culture
conceived in genocide. We act as if
the blood-debt of the past cannot
be canceled until the Indian has no
future; the guiltier he has made us,
the more frantic have been the
attempts to make him disappear.
Yet, having paid out almost
everything he has, the Indian has
survived the long exercise in white
schizophrenia. And there are some,
like Hopi mystic Thomas Banyaka,
who give out prophecies that the
red man will still be here long after
whites have been destroyed in a
holocaust of their own making.
Reprinted with permission from
Ramparts Magazine, February 1970.
| The Cavalier daily February 9, 1970 | |