On Nov. 20, 1969, more than 70 Native Americans gathered before dawn on a dock in San Francisco Bay. They boarded three boats and sailed from the small, foggy harbor in Sausalito, Calif., to Alcatraz Island. They intended to make landfall on territory belonging to the United States government with the intent of claiming it for themselves. Or reclaiming it, depending on your point of view.
The protest was the brainchild of Adam Nordwall, a middle-aged Ojibwe businessman from the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, who owned a pest control company, and Richard Oakes, a charismatic young Mohawk ironworker who had left the East Coast and traveled to San Francisco, where he found work as a bartender.
Like many such direct actions, it was both practical and improbable. Previous attempts to occupy the island had been made by Native American activists, who cited provisions in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which said that unused federal lands could be open to claims by certain Native Americans. Alcatraz had been categorized as surplus land by the United States government, sitting unused since the prison there was closed in 1963. After the San Francisco American Indian Center had burned down, and the community needed a new place to gather, Oakes and Nordwall put forward the idea of another occupation. The Rock, they thought, would make a perfect replacement for the destroyed Indian center.
“We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth,” read a proclamation by the group, “a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these 16 acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we know that land values have risen over the years.”
It was a poignantly symbolic move, the Indian rock on the West Coast standing in contrast to the whiteness of Plymouth Rock to the east. It gave a resolute and rugged reminder to all approaching San Francisco of the continued Indian presence in America — a final red punct on the white sentence of Manifest Destiny.
[Read more about how activists returned to Alcatraz in October 2019 to commemorate the occupation’s anniversary.]
America had finished its westward expansion decades earlier, but Indians remained. And by 1969 they had begun asking themselves what an American Indian destiny might be and how it might be achieved.
As Vine Deloria Jr. put it in his watershed book of that year, “Custer Died for Your Sins”: “The more we try to be ourselves the more we are forced to defend what we have never been. The American public feels most comfortable with the mythical Indians of stereotype-land who were always THERE.”
He added, “To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real way to be unreal and ahistorical.”
What that meant in day-to-day life for the Native community was, as Oakes saw it, bickering, brawling, drinking, poverty and alienation. “I saw the end of the rainbow,” he wrote in a magazine article, “the wrong end.”
Oakes became the lead spokesman, and while accounts vary, LaNada Means (no relation to the fellow activist Russell Means) and John Trudell also took up leadership positions. The group, which called itself the Indians of All Tribes, began articulating its vision in earnest via news conferences, radio interviews and news broadcasts. They wanted the island to revert to Indian control and for a spiritual and ecological center and a museum to be built there — all of it staffed by Native personnel.
Almost immediately, bickering and ill will descended on the activists. Oakes was accused of misappropriating funds. The activists had brought a lot of pot but not enough jackets or bedrolls. Famous people made donations without a thought about how those donations would be or could be used. Creedence Clearwater Revival donated $15,000 for a boat, but the protesters failed to hire a captain. At one point, someone donated hundreds of turkeys, but there was no way to cook them all, and frozen, plastic-wrapped turkeys littered the island.
It wasn’t all a mess, of course. As the months wore on, the activists (at one point numbering in the hundreds) established a school and started a radio station. They cooked and cleaned together. They talked and shared stories and drummed and planned, together, for the future.
But it was unsustainable. In January 1970, Oakes’s 13-year-old daughter, Yvonne, fell three stories and hit her head. She died five days later, and Oakes left the island. Communication was cut off from the mainland. Conditions worsened. Negotiations with the Nixon administration continued but — despite what seemed to be genuine sympathy on President Richard M. Nixon’s part — ultimately led nowhere.
In June 1971, 18 months after the protest began, the last 15 activists were removed from the island by United States marshals. In 1972, a Richard Oakes was shot to death in an altercation in Sonoma County, Calif.
Native people are America’s most visible invisible minority. We occupy a lot of America’s head space — a fundamental part of the country’s self-regard and the stories it tells about itself — but most Americans will go their entire lives without having any kind of prolonged, sustained contact with us in person. Native people are met as myth in the mind or not at all.
One of the most durable myths that shapes the thinking about us is that we began living lives of untrammeled freedom and complete autonomy in the Nearctic garden and we fundamentally ended as people when the frontier was closed — that North America begins with Indians and America truly begins once we’re gone.
This thinking was best expressed on the first page of Dee Brown’s 1970 best seller, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” He writes that the latter half of the 19th century was “an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.”
On the other side of that flat fantasy are the myths that arose after Alcatraz and, subsequently, the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington in 1972 and the more prolonged and violent takeover of Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973.
Those myths stand in counterpoint and contrast to the earlier ones of our demise and largely center on the leaders of Native resistance. In these new myths, people like Dennis Banks and Russell Means and Clyde Bellecourt emerge as freedom fighters who selflessly gave themselves to the struggle for Indian people and won. If Chief Joseph was captured, Dennis Banks never was (he did, however, turn himself in). If Sitting Bull quit the fight and toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Russell Means never did (though he was the voice for Pochantas’s father in the Disney cartoon of her life). Neither the premature stories of our collective death nor the tales of the selfless heroism are totally true. But suspended between those two narratives is Alcatraz.
Fifty years ago, those activists traveled to the Rock in order to remind America of its promises to us, in an appeal to its better nature. For a year and a half, they loved and suffered, starved and partied, painted slogans and formed councils. They were idealistic and in despair. They fought, and they played. They were hopeless, and they were charting some kind of course toward a better future. They were focused, and their energy was dissipated in endless feuds. They appeared on the nightly news, and they were completely forgotten.
And in all of that I find, I see, a kind of profound glory: They dared to be Indian and human. It is there, on that carved rock, that truly modern Native Americans can be said to have begun.
David Treuer is the author, most recently, of “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present.”
"how" - Google News
November 20, 2019 at 05:01PM
https://ift.tt/2pDRuOa
How a Native American Resistance Held Alcatraz for 18 Months - The New York Times
"how" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MfXd3I
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How a Native American Resistance Held Alcatraz for 18 Months - The New York Times"
Post a Comment