‘The Indians have landed!’ — how Alcatraz was occupied
At 2 a.m. on Nov. 20, 1969, 78 American Indians representing 20 tribal groups gathered on the Sausalito waterfront. They loaded two pleasure boats with food and sleeping bags. Then they sailed to Alcatraz Island, pulled into the former federal prison’s landing dock and disembarked.
As they landed, a lone guard who had been alerted to what was happening sent a radio message: “Mayday! Mayday! The Indians have landed!”
The group, which included six children, walked up the steep road to the threestory warden’s house and set up their headquarters, hanging a picture of Apache leader Geronimo over the fireplace mantel. As the sky grew lighter, they built a fire and began
drumming and singing traditional Indian songs.
The Indian occupation of Alcatraz had begun. It would continue for more than a year and a half.
The occupation reflected the passionate social activism of the late 1960s and had deep historical roots in the dispossession of California Indian lands and destruction of Indian culture by the Spanish, Mexicans and Americans, the last of whom waged a genocidal campaign into the 1870s. It also took place against the background of a contentious debate in San Francisco over what to do with Alcatraz, which had become a white elephant.
The immediate political background of the occupation was a 1963 legal settlement that finally resolved all outstanding California Indian land claims against the federal government, awarding Indians $29.1 million for the loss of 64 million acres of what had once been their land. Although 78% of the 14,737 California Indians who voted approved the settlement, there was strong opposition to it.
The settlement was reached in the context of a federal policy called termination, whose goal was to encourage assimilation and end Indian tribal sovereignty and dependence on the federal government — and, Native Americans argued, acquire their resourcerich reservation lands.
Termination had been U.S. policy since the 1950s. But it was about to collide with a burgeoning sense of Native American identity and a new generation of Indian activists.
The federal prison on Alcatraz was closed in 1963, and the island was classified as excess federal property. On March 8, 1964, five Bay Area Sioux Indians occupied the island, saying the Sioux Treaty of 1868 gave them rights to it. They also offered to buy it for 47 cents an acre — the peracre value of the $29.1 million settlement resolving Indian land claims.
The Indians were escorted off the site by federal marshals, but the seed of the 1969 occupation had been planted. As Adam Fortunate Eagle writes in “Alcatraz! Alcatraz! The Indian Occupation of 19691971,” “We felt that if Alcatraz became Indian country it would, almost by magic, solve all sorts of problems of being Indian in the Bay Area and serve as a beacon of hope and pride for Indian people all over the country.”
Meanwhile, the federal government asked San Francisco if it was interested in acquiring Alcatraz, and the Board of Supervisors formed a commission to consider it. As Richard DeLuca writes in “We Hold the Rock! The Indian Attempt to Reclaim Alcatraz Island,” an article in the spring 1983 issue of California History magazine, the commission heard more than 500 proposals. The one favored by the city, put forward by Texas oilman Lamar Hunt, would be a giant monument to the Space Age, with a museum and a 364foot space tower, along with a shopping and dining area that would be a “historically accurate reproduction of San Francisco, 1890.” The main cell block would be preserved as a tourist attraction.
In September 1969, the supervisors and Mayor Joseph Alioto endorsed Hunt’s plan. But the proposal ran into public resistance, and the Interior Department soon proposed to preserve the island as a national park.
It was at this fraught moment that the second group of Indians, which called itself Indians of All Tribes, occupied Alcatraz.
Its spokesman was a 27yearold Mohawk named Richard Oakes, an iron worker who had recently moved to San Francisco with his wife and their five children. He enrolled in the newly created Native American studies program at San Francisco State University and became involved with the American Indian Center on Valencia Street, which offered job, health and social programs to Indians who had been drawn to the Bay Area by job offers under the termination policy, but found themselves living in poverty.
When the center was destroyed by fire in October 1969, Indian activists were galvanized into action. On Nov. 9, Fortunate Eagle invited reporters to Fisherman’s Wharf and persuaded the skipper of a schooner to take him, Oakes and a few other Native American activists to Alcatraz.
The plan was to simply sail around the island, symbolically claiming it. As the boat neared Alcatraz, however, Oakes suddenly dived into the water and swam to the island, followed by two other Indians. As Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior write in “Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee,” Oakes “was having none of the ‘symbolic’ claiming of the island. He insisted on the real thing.”
The Coast Guard promptly removed them,
but activists decided that if they had enough people, they could hold the island. Oakes recruited dozens of young Native American activists, mostly students, and the Nov. 20 occupation was set.
The occupation would raise national awareness of the plight of native peoples, but also divide the Indian community and result in personal tragedy for Oakes. That story will be the subject of the next Portals.
The San Francisco Public Library is hosting a number of programs and exhibitions about the Alcatraz occupation, including an evening of recollections by activists Tuesday and a slide show of photographs by Ilka Hartmann.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/ portals. Email: metro@ sfchronicle.com