Lots of them identified with the “Red Power Movement,” but the occupiers referred to their group on the island as “Indians of All Tribes” (IAT). One of the participants estimated that some 15,000 people, many of them Native, came to visit the occupiers in the early months. The New York Times reported on December 12, 1969, that possibly “a thousand Indians” were on the island. LaNada War Jack, Shoshone/Bannock) and Shirley Guevara, plus children and some non-Native sympathizers, such as college students from around the Bay Area and from UCLA, were a part of the occupation. Women, such as the student leaders LaNada Boyer (now Dr. This was an unarmed, peaceful occupation that would stretch over a period of about a year and a half. On November 20th, and despite a blockade by the Coast Guard, 80 American Indians got support from “free-spirited boat owners of the No Name Bar” in Sausalito (according to the video, We Hold the Rock) and moved onto the island under the cover of darkness. The Proclamation was already in hand on the 9th. Coast Guard intervened to remove them, but fourteen more American Indians arrived again that day and spent the night there, before departing. In an ironic move, they claimed Alcatraz by “right of discovery.” The U.S. Five men, including Richard Oakes (Mohawk, a student from San Francisco State), Jim Vaughn (Cherokee), Joe Bill (“Eskimo”), and Ross Harden (Ho-Chunk) jumped off a boat and swam to the island on November 9th. More lasting efforts came about in late 1969, not coincidentally as Thanksgiving, a long contested holiday, approached. The next year, in 1964, a few Sioux men, led by Richard “Dick” McKenzie (from Rosebud, South Dakota) decided to try to occupy the island. government declared the island “surplus federal property.” The penitentiary was closed in 1963, and the U.S. But such moments of attention drawn to Alcatraz in that period were rare. Their fate is still a matter of debate today. We felt lucky that they had not approached our boat, asking to come aboard. My family was in a fishing boat very near the island that day, and we shivered when we got home that evening and saw on the TV news that there had been an escape, with the men believed to have tried to reach their freedom by using an improvised raft. In 1962, three inmates made a dramatic escape from the prison on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. (photocredit: Wikipedia, Noncommercial Reuse) INTRODUCTION by Stephanie Wood, University of Oregon, Honoring Tribal Legacies
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