Native Americans take over Alcatraz Island in bid to raise land rights awareness

At first glance, Alcatraz seems like an unlikely spot for a reclamation effort — the isolated island is accessible only by boat and known mainly for its namesake federal penitentiary. But it is near San Francisco, which as a result of urban relocation policies, natural migration and a surge of Native American enrollment in the University of California system, had become a hub for Native Americans and Native American activism in the 1960s.

In early November 1969, a group of Native American activists chartered a boat and began circling the island, symbolically reclaiming it as their own.

Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 20, the symbolism of the action fell away, replaced by a full-scale occupation.

The location was actually perfectly suited for such a protest, says William Deverell, professor of history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

“[The protest] was cleverly centered in the urban residential zone of American expansion — the city that the Gold Rush made, the state that promulgated genocidal policies aimed at native peoples,” he said. “It had all the buzz of Alcatraz as both terrifying and somehow romantic — “The Rock” — that people didn’t want to occupy, they wanted to flee. But here were these activists claiming it, reclaiming it, waving a flag of different colors, demanding to be seen. That’s a PR and activist recipe for power, if fleeting power,” Deverell said.

In fact, Alcatraz had already been the site of a Native American reclamation effort earlier in the decade, albeit a much smaller one.

In 1964, about 40 Native Americans had claimed the island on behalf of the land’s native people. That occupation had lasted only a few hours, but activists took note of the public support and media coverage it had garnered in that short time.

“Native student organizations were alive and active in the ’50s and the ’60s, but Alcatraz thrust those movements onto a national stage,” said David Treuer, professor of English at USC Dornsife and author of the National Book Award finalist The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (Riverhead Books, 2019). Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.

A call for honoring promises

For the basis of their claim to Alcatraz, the activists stated that under a 19th-century treaty between the United States government and the Sioux and Lakota, defunct federal land could be reclaimed for native peoples. Alcatraz’s prison had been closed in 1963, and the island had largely been abandoned following its closure.

Treuer noted that the activists had both symbolic and tangible goals for their protest. In concrete terms, they wanted to turn the island into a spiritual, cultural and ecological center for Native Americans, staffed by Native Americans.

But the spirit of the occupation, as well as some of its more performative elements, was influenced by other 1960s civil rights movements and organizations, notably the Black Panthers.

“Both the [Black Panther] and native activists engaged in symbolic struggles that were very theatrical and also very effective,” Treuer said. But they also did a lot of important grassroots work, he said, noting that both groups created clinics, schools and other resources for their communities.

But where the Black Panthers wanted the government to recognize civil rights, “Indians, by contrast, wanted the government to recognize treaty rights,” Treuer explained.

The civil rights movement wanted the government to change the law to grant equal rights to people who did not yet have them. Native American activists wanted the government to recognize the rights they had already been granted in existing treaties and laws.

Drawing the nation’s attention

Although the 1969 protest earned a good deal of public support and media coverage, it suffered under the weight of several major problems.

One was the execution of the occupation itself: Many of the protesters were not adequately provisioned for a long stay, and as the months wore on, it grew increasingly difficult to obtain drinking water and electricity. Infighting among the protest leaders also became a problem.

On June 11, 1971, the last of the occupants were removed from the island, which in 1972 became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Today, the island is managed by the National Park Service.

Although the occupation of Alcatraz was brief, it brought Native American issues into the consciousness of the wider public, and it shaped land rights protests for decades to come.

“For the first time Americans and Native Americans saw Indians publicly proud of who they were and not afraid to take on the American government and to remind it of its obligations to Native nations. It was exhilarating, and it had a lasting effect,” Treuer said.