Rock, Reservation and Prison: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz Island

INTRODUCTION With his famous words of surrender, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces tribe finally yielded his people's control over their lives and lands: "The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. . . . I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." The last of the great Indian Wars thus ended with a plea for tribal children; the great war chief hoped his descendants might find peace in the arms of his conquering foe. As the Nez Perces prisoners of war were marched toward Indian Territory, the United States at last held total dominion over Native America. That dominion would not be seriously challenged throughout the ensuing century, as American Indians found their cultural and tribal identity the object of continued assault. But by the age of ethnic awakening in the 1960s, Native Americans in increasing numbers saw their essential problem in the legacy of Chief Joseph's and others' surrender of self-determination. White control seemed a dead end. Such was the heritage that informed a handful of young, urban Indians in undertaking the first, perhaps greatest Native American act of collective rebellion since the surrender: the reclaiming of Alcatraz Island. The nineteen-month occupation that followed was to transform Alcatraz from a defunct federal penitentiary into a potent symbol of American Indian consciousness- or, more precisely, a set of complicated, conflicting, liberating and defining signs of contemporary Native America. Alcatraz quickly became ”our Statue of Liberty,” in the words of a Comanche. ”THE symbolic act of Indian awareness, ” Look magazine dubbed the occupation. In the glow of global publicity on this rocky stage, American Indians claimed much more than a barren and abandoned island; they asserted their shared power and pride in rhetoric and imagery that transcended their immediate claim to the island itself