Alcatraz occupation, 40 years ago, still news

Alcatraz occupation, 40 years ago, still news
Caille Millner
Monday, November 30, 2009


It wasn't very long ago. Only 40 years. But try to imagine how the Indian occupation of Alcatraz looks to a child of the 1980s, a child who grew up knowing nothing but Republican administrations and white flight and apocalyptic militias and culture war and the general atomization that has infected American society since then: The Indians were allowed to take back Alcatraz? No one shot them? There was no talk of waterboarding or draconian prison sentences? Are we even talking about the same country?

You may laugh or call me cynical, but these are the questions that were running through my mind as I read about the sunrise ceremony for the 40th anniversary of the Alcatraz occupation, which began on Nov. 9, 1969 and ended on June 11, 1971.

I had heard, of course, about the occupation in the abstract. But, perhaps because it happened around the same time as so many of the other marginalized peoples' struggles in this country (and perhaps because the many valid reasons behind those struggles got drowned out by the din, and the fear, of the last 40 years), the details hadn't really registered with me.

A pan-tribal group of young Indians, mostly urban college students, were the ones to launch the occupation, setting out for the island in a chartered boat named the "Monte Cristo." That sense of humor is the thread that runs through the story of their 20 months on the island. "We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago," reads "The Alcatraz Proclamation" that they wrote. One group of occupiers claimed their right to the island based on a 19th century Sioux treaty that gave them the right to occupy any surplus, unoccupied federal lands. These are the kinds of jokes that help me understand why the Indians had so much local support. It doesn't seem like there was a lot of humor going around San Francisco in the late 1960s.

Of course, that's because so much of what was going on was dead serious. The Indians, for example, were fighting not only horrific living conditions on their reservations but devastating federal policies designed to strip them of their land (Termination, which was meant to end federal recognition of the tribes) and their culture (Relocation, which "encouraged" Indians to leave the reservations by offering them one-way bus tickets into cities). Nobody was talking about any of this before the occupation. And fortunately - in large part because of the occupation - no one is talking about those policies today, because they're no longer being followed.

It is that last point that put this child of the 1980s in a swoon. Nobody talks about the reasons behind the Indian occupation of Alcatraz anymore because the occupation worked. I often hear older people saying that people my age and younger are nothing but consumers, that we're apathetic, that we don't protest and won't fight against injustice. But when we were growing up, the fight against injustice was itself on the run. Forget believing that fighting against anything could lead to the accomplishment of a goal: it was difficult to fathom a march, much less an occupation, that wouldn't end in tragedy, violence and the election of the opposition to positions of power for years to come.

That's why the story of the Alcatraz occupation remains powerful. Forty years later, it sounds like good news.

Caille Millner is an editorial writer. E-mail her at cmillner@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/30/EDAJ1AQNQG.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 19 of the San Francisco Chronicle