I was visiting my uncle in San Francisco during this time. He knew the producers of Ironside starring Raymond Burr of Perry Mason fame. They were doing a shoot of the show on Alcatraz with the Native Americans' occupation as the storyline. We were excited to be asked to go out with them on the shoot and took a yacht to the Island.
Beforehand, we had to sign waivers saying that the U.S. Government would not protect us while we were on the occupied Island. The tribes were great, courteous and gave a tour of the prison as well as told us about their Movement. It was something I'll never forget and learned so much about their plight.
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Miigwetch/thank-you for this coverage. One important note: PLEASE take the time to identify the other people in these photos! You could literally Google/Wiki the names of John Trudell's family and others in your photos. We are not gone, and many of the occupiers and their families are easily found if the Times made just a tiny effort to get to know Indian communities. I've been writing to you for years on this point. COVER INDIAN COUNTRY. Thanks. Dr. Veronica Pasfield, Bay Mills Indian Community Ojibwe-kwe
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Just watched an episode of Drunk History on this very topic! Had never heard of this “resistance” before. Good on them.
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I had read that the 1070 song, "Ride, Captain, Ride," by Blues Image, was about this event. No mention here, and there are a lot of other explanations for the meaning of the song that have been offered through the years. Now I'd like to see a write-up of a much bigger event: when the Native Americans in the Santa Fe, N.M. area kicked out the Spanish several hundred years ago.
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If the natives were any good at organizing for a common goal and working together, they wouldn’t have lost the island in the first place.
@Charles :
wow, you've totally missed out on a lot of knowledge and actual history. 90% of the Native Americans in North America were killed by European diseases they had no immunity to: smallpox and measles among them.
HOW would people "organize" to prevent these, silent and invisible bacteria, from destroying their world?
See: https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html
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Native Americans were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of European immigrants and their descendants as well as the diseases they brought. No amount of organization and cooperation among native peoples was ever going to let them keep any land their conquerors considered valuable.
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@Charles sigh, there were about 25,000,000 natives in north America when the Europeans arrived disease, genocide, biological and conventional warfare killed 96% of them. No amount of organization can withstand a government that's willing to kill every Buffalo in an effort to wipe out the Indians
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Thank you for this tribute. An Alcatraz occupant brought our family together. Larry Benegas, a tribal leader of the Kumeyaay family and a social services worker in San Diego dedicated his life to improving the lives of his family, preserving Kumeyaay culture and also to helping the people of San Diego through adoptions counseling and placement. He was a warrior for all.
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Noticing above the title of this article says "past tense" as a category such as other articles fall into "politics, business, etc."
That category reminds me of a book, Past Watch, written by Orson Scott Card, the noted Science Fiction and Fantasy writer and Hugo Award and Nebula winner in those book categories.
The premise was of traveling the whole of history, from ancient and Pre-Columbian time and into the future. As it originates sometime in our future, it goes forward and backward in time to witness and maybe to participate in the past.
I travelled to New Mexico some years ago driving to Albuquerque. We stopped in Sky City, the casino named on the Acoma Pueblo's property. We skipped the casino, but took a tour of the Acoma pueblo, and are very grateful we did.
On site is a huge cathedral built by Jesuits and Spanish Conquistadors. Native Americans offer tours and retell the history and significance of that site and of the life on the Pueblo. The rugged landscape is otherworldly in a wonderful way.
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I believe that “Past Tense” is the heading used for the series of articles drawn from material in the NYT’s photo archive.
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I read as many Native American authored books in my thirties as I was not educated about this in school or college at the university of Minnesota where I got my teaching license in elementary education. I learned of the hanging of 36 Dakota inMankato Minnesota on Dec. 26th, 1862 and many more tragic events.
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I wish someone could finally clarify which groups should lead lives determined by their ethnic identities and which ones are allowed to choose assimilation and modernity.
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@Frank Knarf ~ I certainly hope that you're being cynical. The idea that in these times, someone would have the power to dictate other people's cultural identities is absurd, and is quite fascist. However, that was in fact done in the 1800's and into the early 1900's, when Native American families were broken up, and children were taken from their parents and forced to go to boarding schools to be indoctrinated with white-man's culture. Let us never repeat that nightmare,
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When I hear the OK Boomer canard, I want to ask the smug namecallers if they know about the occupation of Alcatraz or AIM or the Black Panthers or the Young Lords or the Students For A Democratic Society or the Yippies or NORML.
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@Michael Simmons I spent the first 61 years of my life in San Francisco. From our kitchen window , we had a straight on view of Alcatraz. About six months ago, I was talking to a supermarket clerk in Folsom, ca. He was around 30 years old. He had never heard of the Haight-Ashbury or hippies. I was dumbfounded.
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I remember this but I was too young to have an opinion. This brought the recollection back into context.
What is remarkable to me is how much Indians are visible in our current society. I took a driving trip thought the western states recently. There are Indian casinos/hotels everywhere. And an Indian family lives in a gated community near me. They get their income from the casinos. They have gourmet food delivery trucks bringing in supplies periodically. So at least some are doing well. And after what this country did to them, I am happy for them.
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by coincidence, i happen to be reading Tommy Orange's mesmerizing novel called "There There". it's a story about urban native americans living in oakland. his writing is distinctive, his characters are memorable, and this should be required reading for anyone interested in modern american life, regardless of when you or your ancestors arrived in this country.
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@joan I agree about Tommy Orange’s novel, which I sm reading with my book club. It is excellent and eloquent and the Alcatraz occupation is Important in the book, so seeing these pictures of it and reading this story was perfectly timed.
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@joan an incredible novel. Powerful, brutal, hard to bear...
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Treuer's article evokes the heroic rise of the American Indian Movement in the 1970's. While I'm thrilled to see the occupation of Alcatraz remembered, his desire to seem 'balanced ' leads him to inflate tiny details about Dennis Banks and Russell Means into significant misdeeds (as if the mythologies around AIM are just as distorted as the racist narrative America created about its taking of Indian lands). Russell Means taking a Voice Over job is hardly the equivalent of the American army sending in attack helicopters and tanks against women and children at Wounded Knee. Dennis Banks' years' long resistance against the FBI's attempts to murder him are hardly diminished because he gave himself up so he could survive for his family. Dennis' life story is as inspiring as any American figure we celebrate. He was a child when he was kidnapped from his family by authorities who confined him in an 'Indian School' where he wasn't allowed to speak his own language or see his parents. He was sent to prison by police who rounded up Indians in Minneapolis to use as de facto slave labor. And yet Dennis still had the vision to create the American Indian Movement and organize its takeover of the BIA in Nixon's Washington. Banks and Means are 'mythic' warriors unreservedly. No, not perfect. But there's no need to qualify their achievements, in the same way we celebrate Martin Luther King and Malcolm X for taking on the violent racism of the government despite being merely human .
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Do not forget Lenard Peltier
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the Indigenous remain at the forefront of the struggle to save our place on this planet.
had the europeans come with wisdom and dignity, this would be a very different world.
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@harvey wasserman Did the Inca consolidate their empire by deploying wisdom and dignity? The noble savage myth sure takes a beating and still survives. Does it not occur to you that the Germanic tribes of northwestern Europe were indigenous from the point of view of the Roman Empire?
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@harvey wasserman
"Wisdom and dignity" are easy to prescribe in hindsight. The Europeans came with what they had at the time: monarchies competing for empire through settler colonialism, extraction economies, and military power, all divinely backed by a papal mandate promulgated as the Doctrine of Discovery, aka planting the flag for Jesus. This context helps to explain their primitive and violent treatment of the Western Hemisphere.
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It is too bad that the All Tribes group did not succeed. I remember as a kid being fascinated by their occupation. With a bit more organization and luck, seems like they could have succeeded. Alcatraz now is most remembered for its film roles. Doubt many folks remember the All Tribes. Hopefully this article reignites interest in them.
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@Tortuga Of course interest is going to reignite. In the last decade we lost John Trudell, Russel Means, Dennis Banks... White America gets really nostalgic about Indians once they are safely dead.
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@Tortuga
Perfect combination: a film about All Tribes and the occupation. (I would vote for documentary, but could live with fictionalized if it gets more people into theaters.)
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@dg smae goes on in the arctic of Canadians north... reservations close to population centers ... like oka, kanasatake... move visible... but still same problems... Canada no different.
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