Indian Students and Reminiscences of Alcatraz

Abstract

I was involved in the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz by American Indian students from San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, during the first six months of that event. I was a volunteer instructor in the then-developing Native American studies program at UC Berkeley, and many of the original fourteen who secretly landed on Alcatraz Island on 9 November 1969 were members of my class on American Indian liberation. I am taking the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Alcatraz to add some reminiscences and perhaps little-known facts to the story that others are now documenting. As far as I can tell, the first academic article in the United States to be published on this experiment in Indian liberation was mine. It was published in The Journal of Ethnic Studies in 1978 on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Alcatraz landing. Its title was “Free Alcatraz: the Culture of Native American Liberation.” Earlier, in the spring of 1970, I had read a draft of this article before the Northwest Anthropological Association meeting in Oregon. It is interesting to note that anthropologists, who for so long have billed themselves as experts on things Indian, totally ignored this historic event. Although my graduate work was in anthropology at UC Berkeley, my personal association and ethnic loyalties lay with the Native American community, so I made certain that the Indians of All Tribes (as the occupiers called themselves) re-