Introduction

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