By Chuy Varela

"We, the native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians ... We plan to develop on this island several Indian institutions: 1. A Center for Native American Studies ... 2. An American Indian Spiritual Center ... 3. An Indian Center of Ecology ... 4. A Great Indian Training School ... and an American Indian Museum ... In the name of all Indians, therefore, we reclaim this island for our Indian nations ... We feel this claim is just and proper, and that this land should rightfully be granted to us for as long as the rivers shall run and the sun shall shine."

Indians of All Tribes

The Alcatraz Proclamation, 1969

THE OCCUPATION OF Alcatraz Island by the political organization Indians of All Tribes on November 20, 1969, ignited a Native American movement that shook America. The takeover was a dramatic flash point in a time of great political turmoil; it raised new awareness about this nation's original inhabitants and what U.S. policy had done to them through colonization and the westward expansion.

The occupation also fulfilled a Hopi prophecy that said Indians would be driven from the east to the west into the water and that upon a rock an indigenous movement would rise again. The media described this movement as "Red Power." It organized demonstrations and property seizures to call attention to Native grievances.

"Alcatraz represents a very significant change in the history of Indian people," Bill Means, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council, says. "It brought a new spirit that not only said we could stand up but that it was our obligation as Indian representatives of our nations to let the government know that we have the right to control our own destiny."

Now, 30 years later, a celebration honoring occupation veterans will take place on Alcatraz Island Oct. 23. The event brings together national Native leaders and entertainers to remember the legacy of the occupation.

"The story of the Alcatraz occupation has to do with the treatment of Indians by the United States government," said Adam Fortunate Eagle, an artist and author who was a principal organizer of the occupation (at that time, Fortunate Eagle was known as Adam Nordwall). "People don't realize how much Indians have lost in land and resources at the whim of the U.S. government."

A brief history of the land grab: In 1830 the American government passed the Indian Removal Act, which ordered the removal of Indians living east of the Mississippi to reservations west of the Mississippi. That decision was fought by the Cherokee tribe, which won the right before the Supreme Court to remain on its land in the Southeast. But the decision didn't deter President Andrew Jackson from ordering the military to remove and escort indigenous peoples to territories west of the Mississippi. The result was the infamous Trail of Tears, when Cherokees and other southeast tribes were forced to march from their ancestral homelands to the Oklahoma Territory. Thousands died along the way.

In 1887 the government decided that the tribes still had too much land and passed the Dawes Act, which resulted in the loss of 90 million acres of Indian tribal land. In 1953 Congress passed House Resolution 108, the termination policy that called for the eventual closing down of all reservations, the abolition of the remaining 350 treaties, and the phasing out of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In a total contradiction of the Indian Removal Act, which isolated and shipped off Indians to reservations, the government now hoped to force the assimilation of tribal peoples into the American mainstream. To carry this out the government began a relocation program that paid Indians a stipend if they moved from reservations to one of eight urban areas around the country. If they chose to remain on the reservation, where depression was waging despite America's postwar prosperity, it would be without benefits or services. Not only was the policy insidious, it was also an insult to the 25,000 Indians who had fought in World War II.

But those Indians who chose to relocate quickly organized.

"I came from boarding schools in Kansas and Oklahoma," says Millie Ketcheshawno, an occupation veteran and event director for the 30th anniversary celebration. "They tried to take the Indian out of us. I arrived in the Bay Area as part of a relocation program in 1958. There were a lot of Native American people already here who had come out during the war to work in the shipyards. They, with the help of the Quakers, started Intertribal Friendship House. It was how Indians connected ... the circle just kept getting bigger."

"We started gathering once a week for Wednesday-night dinners. But a board [of white people] oversaw the Friendship House, and we were getting tired of white people running our lives. So we pulled a coup and nominated each other for the board, took a vote for the board positions, and took control of the Intertribal Friendship House. That was the early '60s, and we were starting to get bold and brave."

In 1964 representatives of the Lakota Sioux tried to lay a claim to Alcatraz Island through the 1863 Fort Laramie Treaty, which declared that surplus land would revert to Indian people. (The menacing penitentiary known as "the Rock" had been closed down in 1963, and though the island was considered surplus, it didn't receive its official designation until 1968.) The occupation didn't last long – part of an afternoon – before the Coast Guard took them off the island. The idea lay dormant until 1968, when Fortunate Eagle (Nordwall), then a teacher and head of the United Bay Area Council of American Indians, started talking about taking over Alcatraz again.

"An interesting phenomenon was occurring in America in the '60s as the Vietnam War went full bore," Fortunate Eagle recalls. "We started observing the social unrest. In the Bay Area we saw Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement and the protests in the university systems. Flower children became hippies and there was the antiwar movement. I observed how the Black Panthers came into existence, along with Cesar Chavez with California migrant workers. We didn't react until the end of this era in 1969."

Fortunate Eagle began to recruit young Indians into his Alcatraz movement. His ideas caught the imagination of a new generation that included a young Mohawk leader attending San Francisco State named Richard Oakes. Fortunate Eagle also befriended Tim Finley, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, who was instrumental in getting their story and the ensuing occupation on the front page.

"We tried to set foot on Alcatraz on November 9, 1969," Ketcheshawno says. "Originally we had scheduled three other boats to take us, but when we got to the docks the boats weren't there, but there was a lot of press. So Tim Finley from the Chronicle says, 'You see that little boat over there? That's Reuters. You better do something pretty fast, or all this press is going to hop off.' That's when Adam Norwald asked this clipper ship from Canada [the Monte Cristo] to take us to the island. [Captain Craig] said he could take us around the island but he couldn't land us because he was sailing under a foreign flag. He took about 50 or 60 of us and we came back. But as we got a part of the way around the Rock these guys – Richard Oakes and four other young men – started jumping off the boat and tried to swim to the island. So the captain is jumping up and down saying 'Don't nobody else do it, I'm flying a foreign flag, and the U.S. can fire on me.' "

The only one that made it to the island was a student from S.F. State named Joe Bill. The Coast Guard picked the rest up out of the water and returned them to the mainland.

"Everybody went back to the San Francisco Indian Center," Ketcheshawno continues, "and Adam asked what people wanted to do. 'We want to take the island!' So Adam got a boat and told everybody to get their sleeping bags and come back. He got a fishing boat – the New Vera 2 – and for five bucks a head they were let off on Alcatraz. They were removed the next morning by the government.

"Everybody thought that was it over. But on the afternoon of November 20 we contacted Peter Bowan, the owner of the No Name Bar in Sausalito, who had a boat. He said he would take them after he got off at 2 a.m. It was spur of the moment ... around 90 people showed up in Sausalito. We took three boats and stayed, and the rest is history, so to speak."

People started coming to the island almost immediately. Tim Finley kept their story on the front page of the Chronicle. Jane Fonda supplied generators. The first Thanksgiving all the restaurants around Fisherman's Wharf donated food to the people on the island.

But soon factionalism would dampen the excitement of the occupation.

"After November 20," Fortunate Eagle says, "Richard Oakes established control of the island and held a press conference where he excluded me and other mainland leaders. We were now bystanders. There on the conference table was a little sign that said 'Indians on Alcatraz will rule Alcatraz.' "

Now a potent student Indian movement prevailed. It put an elected council into place that gave everybody a job. All decisions were made by unanimous consent. Many meetings were held to discuss rapidly changing events. Yet Oakes's brash style of leadership was not always appreciated; other leaders, like now-famed poet John Trudell, a Santee Sioux, soon arrived on the island. And as the students returned to school they were replaced by Indians who were influenced by the S.F. hippie culture. With them they brought drugs and alcohol, which had been banned by the original occupiers. Then, on Jan. 5, 1970, Oakes's 13-year-old stepdaughter fell three floors down an open stairwell to her death, and Oakes and his family left the island. After Oakes's departure, the movement's focus was quickly lost.

"The government played a waiting game," Ketcheshawno says. "The [General Services Administration], who was responsible for this surplus land, wanted to start taking people off the island immediately. Same with the Coast Guard and S.F. officials. But President Nixon's office said, 'Don't do anything.' They didn't want another Kent State, and the Vietnam War was raging. They had to proceed with caution. So Nixon passed it on to two negotiators from his cabinet."

One proposal the government floated was to give the occupiers the then-abandoned Fort Mason site for Alcatraz Island. "Maintaining Alcatraz would have been a terrible economic burden, so I urged [the swap]," Fortunate Eagle says. "But Oakes turned down the idea flatter than hell."

The occupation that had started with clear goals ended muddily. "Responsibility was thrust upon people who had no diplomatic responsibility or negotiating experience," Fortunate Eagle says. "So nothing was ever [directly] accomplished that benefited Indians."

As the last occupier stepped onto the mainland on June 11, 1971, 19 months after the takeover, it all might have seemed a failure. But Alcatraz spawned a movement, and regardless of leadership, the occupation was a bargaining chip for Indian people. "On December 22, 1973, President Nixon repudiated the Termination Policy, the most important victory in the history of American Indian political activism," Fortunate Eagle says. "Never in our history had we been able to stop a government land-grab policy. Nixon also, by executive order, returned contested lands back to tribes. A whole bunch of positive Indian legislation came through as a result of the occupation of Alcatraz ... [including] the Gaming Act, providing a more self-sufficient existence."

"The legacy of Alcatraz," Fortunate Eagle concludes, "set a precedent that awakened the public and the news media that we were not a vanished race."

The Alcatraz Occupation 30th Anniversary Celebration takes place on Alcatraz Sat/23, 9 a.m. Musicians and speakers appearing include John Trudell, Walela, Ulali, Charlie Hill, Arigon Starr, Gayle Hanson Johnson, Richard Moves Camp, Grace Thorpe, Wilma Mankiller, Dennis Banks, Peter Bratt, and Peter Coyote. Tickets ($7.75-$9.25) are limited and available through the Blue and Gold Fleet at (415) 705-5555.

PHOTO: MICHELLE VIGNES