There There & the Occupation of Alcatraz

Prior to reading There There by Tommy Orange, I was almost completely unaware of the Native American occupation of Alcatraz. Despite going to a fairly liberal school, the occupation of Alactraz was all but a footnote in United States History. In fact, when I first began reading Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield's chapter, I researched the occupation of Alcatraz in order to help me better understand its significance within the context of the novel. 

Alcatraz holds a fascinating history. Beginning as a refuge for Natives fleeing the California Mission system, the island was transformed into the famous penitentiary before being abandoned in 1963. In 1964, a group of Sioux activists occupied Alcatraz for four hours before being removed by federal marshals. The activists claimed that the excess federal land should be returned to the Native Americans, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie as their legal premise. On November 9, 1969, a native man named Richard Oakes led an occupation of the land, this time in response to San Francisco’s sole Native American social center burning down. This occupation only lasted seven hours before the group was removed by the Coast Guard. However, it was this brief occupation that provided Oakes with the information he needed in order to plan something much more elaborate.

On November 20, 1969, just eleven days after Oakes’s first occupation of Alcatraz, he as well as 89 other native activists known as the Indians of All Tribes (IAC) began occupying the island with the intention of converting the land into a new university, museum, and community center. “They offered the federal government a treaty: they would buy Alcatraz ‘for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago.’ Their sardonic proclamation, addressed to ‘the Great White Father and his People,’ drew attention to the continued impact of colonial violence and broken treaties on Native communities, and looked toward a future of Indigenous sovereignty” (Biggs 31). 

Oakes and the IAC’s intentions for occupation were two-fold. Primarily, they wanted claim over the land, as well as federal funding for building the aforementioned amenities in order to form a Native civilization free from intervention by the United States. Secondarily, the occupation was an act of political dissonance. Claiming ‘excess’ land was the IAC’s way of forcing generations of colonizers to realize the hypocrisy of their actions, as well as demand compensation for generations of genocide and colonization. Over the next nineteen months, the occupiers solidified their vision, deciding to pursue an environmental utopia of sorts whilst still navigating negotiations with the United States government. However, Alcatraz was far from utopic, and the occupation ended seemingly abruptly following the accidental death of Oakes’s step-daughter. 

It is difficult to know exactly when the occupation of Alcatraz began to decline. A combination of waning resources, unmoving negotiations, and inter-island conflict all contributed to the downfall. However, the main reason activists began leaving was fairly mundane. Many of the activists were students at University of San Francisco, and had decided to return to their educations. Many felt that negotiations had led nowhere and that the concept of Native sovereignty would not be accomplished at Alcatraz. The ones that stayed, however, were met with aggression and an uphill battle. The United States government refused to relinquish the land, and dwindling resources forced many off the island. The fifteen protestors that remained were escorted off the island at gunpoint by government officials on June 11, 1971, signifying the end of the occupation.

Bibliography

Blansett, Kent. Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement. Yale University Press, 2018. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5cgbqj. Accessed 20 Nov. 2020.

Johnson, Troy. We Hold the Rock: The Alcatraz Indian Occupation. Cal State Long Beach, 2019. National Park Service,https://www.nps.gov/alca/learn/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm. Accessed 20 Nov. 2020.

Biggs, Lois. “‘A Tribe Is an Island:’ Placemaking, Protest, and the Alcatraz Occupation.” Journal of Politics & Society, vol. 30, no. 1, Dec. 2019, pp. 30–46. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?dir ect=true&db=poh&AN=142017113&site=eds-live.