“A
chilly wind blows in from the Pacific as I stand on the island
of Alcatraz looking out over San Francisco Bay.
Surrounding me is a movie crew, our cameras pointed toward the City
hidden in mist. Before me, the fog and mist swirl around in early morning’s
weak light, the sun trying to burn through the damp breezes on the Rock. Standing in patchy sunlight, we wait for the
fog to lift on the City. The shifting
air is alive with the cries of gulls and the clang of harbor buoys, the sad
growl of distant fog horns.
“Behind
us a tall park ranger smiles, telling a group of tourists about the Indian
Occupation of the Island thirty-five years
ago. And when he mentions ‘the failure
of the American Indian Movement,’ I am pierced by personal loss and
sadness. Now in my middle years I fight
these old emotions, shocked at their power to still haunt me with the certain
knowledge that so much more might have been accomplished.
“A
lifetime has passed since I was a young Alcatraz warrior, and now I’m here on
the Island again – but this time with a camera
crew, shooting for a blockbuster movie that will soon be showing in theaters
across the country. And none of that –
the camera crew, the shot list, tons of equipment brought to the Island in huge
water taxis, the day’s work – seems important to me now, nor is the fat check I’ll
receive for my part: I want to just sit
down, find a quiet spot down low, out of the wind, out of the cold… and think. I want to go back, and find out where things
changed, where the momentum was lost.
Where the energy drained out of my life.
“It’s
a time of history and I’m at a moment in my life when that feeling is pretty
pervasive anyway, but this loss is pointed, this hurt is focused on a specific time
and place. This is my personal
story that slips away into the mists, into the whiteout that hovers around Alcatraz on this day, at this minute, for this
heart and mind. All my relations.”
* * *
Those words were written in the fall of 2004, in the midst of
an emotional crisis that is not uncommon for people of a certain age. Though I ended with the notation ‘all my
relations,’ I had lost a connection to that ancient Native American
prayer-closing – which evokes the deep wish for oneness and harmony in the
Great Hoop of Life: the spiritual dance
that includes people and animals, birds and insects and plants, the wind and the
waves… and even the rocks on which we stand.
Having slipped into the half of life that’s so much closer to death –
and knowing that I would never achieve some of my early (or even later) dreams,
nor become the hero I’d longed to be – I felt as though many years behind me
had been wasted while I sat out the easy rains.
Back in 1970, there were no thoughts of sitting out the easy rains. We went where the Sirens called us. I’d heard about the Takeover while in the
midst of doubts about my place in the antiwar movement: I felt far too protected by my student
deferment. Then the notion of fighting
for ‘my people’ called to me, and I identified strongly with the goals of the
Occupation – and the means of attaining those goals. Direct action.
And what were those goals?
John Trudell said it best, in an interview with me late in 1970, after
I’d been to the Rock several times: “We
want the Island, and we want full control over
it. We don’t want to share this control
with any other people – we want Indian people to have it, because for too long
we’ve been living with the Great White Father stereotype that is killing us;
it’s destroying our people. And we’re
not going to stand by and see it happen.”
The three Indian Takeovers of Alcatraz were all more-or-less
intended to bring to the American public the plight of Indians impoverished on
reservations and in urban ghettos throughout America – direct action, meant to
get attention and pressure a government that had for more than a hundred years
broken promise after promise and had hardly changed its stance from the
outright genocide that it had practiced not so very long before.
The first Occupation, in March 1964 (called an ‘invasion’ by
the papers), was intended specifically to be a publicity stunt loaded with a
profound message. A mixed-tribe delegation
of about three dozen people (including attorney Elliot Leighton, Walter Means,
Allen Cottier, Richard McKenzie, Mark Martinez, Garfield Spotted Elk, Adam Nordwall,
and other prominent Bay Area Native American activists), sailed out to the Rock
to present the caretaker with a demand for the Island under the provisions of
the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the Sioux nation that allowed disused
government land (mostly forts in the territories) to revert to Indian
ownership. That first ‘Takeover’ was a
publicity event linked to both Termination and Relocation, two seemingly
beneficent but actually disastrous federal programs to assimilate reservation
Indians into mainstream society.
By 1969, the Alcatraz torch had passed from the older group
of activists to college students who had a more radical point of view (though
the planning group included Nordwall, Earl Livermore and others who had been
part of the 1964 Invasion), and the Takeover actions in November of that
year were serious attempts to claim the land, while forcing the press to look
behind the spectacle at the dire need for reform on the country’s
reservations.
The first attempt on
November 9 was mostly unsuccessful in establishing a real takeover, though
fourteen Indian students
managed to get ashore in the November 10 attempt.
On November 20, the students finally landed
almost a hundred Indians on the Rock.
The Alcatraz Occupation, called “the most significant event
in the history of US-American Indian relations in the post-reservation era,”
catalyzed
many young Indians, giving them hope and showing them that they could gather
and use direct action to build political power.
The Takeover
lasted
from November 1969 to June 1971.
My time
there comprised perhaps a dozen trips that lasted from overnight to a week in duration, with most of them four or
five days.
Close to 18,000 Indians
visited the Island during the nineteen months
of the Alcatraz Occupation, along with maybe 1,000 White visitors.
At times I’ve almost deranged my mind trying
to figure out which group I fall into – and after months of inner argument, I’m
still not sure.
It is interesting that the Indians chose to take over a place
without a corollary in the world of virtually every tribe existing when Whites
first landed on their shores – in their world, no tribe had a building where
the punished miscreants were cut off from family, clan, or tribe. And yet that is where we all wound up, stragglers
like me who joined the several hundred who followed the original Council, who
officially incorporated into ‘Indians of All Nations,’ and who unofficially took
the name ‘Alcatraz Tribe’ and carried away with us the belongingness in that
tribe. All of us have the tribe into
which we were born, and also have this created tribe, this called-together
group of people who came to do a special job and sing a sacred song and dance a
holy dance.
The Alcatraz group comprised
numerous tribes, and many conflicting viewpoints on almost every subject under
consideration. This, of course, is a
situation well-recognized in the world of US Indian affairs – there can be no
single viewpoint, since all parties have a lance stuck in the ground to mark
their positions. And the successive
Councils were adamantly democratic, and strove to operate without a single
leader. But there were spokespersons,
pushed into the limelight by a press that demanded simple stories and needed to
identify a leader.
Richard Oakes, a big handsome square-faced Mohawk with short
unruly hair, was the first to be chosen by newspaper editors as ‘the leader’
(Joe Morris and other old-timers still call him a ‘Chief’). Richard wasn’t a chief when he started – but
perhaps became one as all chiefs do: by leading
well. He stepped into the empty
limelight to become the face of the Alcatraz Takeover – the American public
seemed to love his ready smile – though the group refused to abandon its
democratic experiment. Richard could
have been a successful elected representative, if he’d had the chance. During his time as one of the spokespersons
for the Takeover, Richard welcomed US Attorney Cecil Poole to Alcatraz, the
first time in US
history that such a meeting occurred.
Richard Oakes was in the hospital when I arrived the fourth
time, which was in fact the second of my stays on the Island (I’d made a couple
of runs to drop off goods at Pier 40 earlier in the year, but had not been
allowed to go to the Island until April 1970, as Whites had been prohibited
since January). Some Samoans had laid a
pool cue in Richard’s head, and over the course of a few weeks he had several
surgeries in one of San Francisco
General Hospital’s
old brick buildings. The rumor mill
whispered that the FBI had paid those Samoans, but there was no proof of that.
Going down to SF General to see Richard after the beating, I changed
my mind at the last moment, deciding that it was useless to go inside since he
was still in a coma. That June night, I
stood in the orange cone of a streetlamp’s glow, leaning on a solid brick wall
near the hospital’s black iron fence, smoking hand-rolled tobacco and feeling
less than solid myself. In the cold
summer mist, I shivered in my thin jacket and decided not to go inside,
realising that his spirit would know I was there to support him.
Richard was never fully himself after the attack. He worked to develop another political direct
action activity, but he was killed in a controversial shooting in Northern
California.
Lanada Means (now Dr Lanada Means War Jack, having taken back
her family name) had long been involved in tribal politics in her home state of
Idaho. Her father had schooled her in
civic action at Fort Hall, and she took this responsibility very seriously. She had been part of some direct action
projects at the University of California at Berkeley, and had worked with
Lehman Brightman both in the founding of UNA (United Native Americans) and in
the forming of the first Native American
studies program in the country. And then
came Alcatraz. Lanada was one of the
architects of the Takeover, and remained on the Island for the entire
Occupation, hitching rides on boats to Berkeley and back several days a week so
that she could complete her classes. Without
question, Lanada was one of the powerful personalities that held things
together in those turbulent times, and she worked with other women on the Island
to build a community that would create a new pan-tribal society that would
last.
John Trudell had left the Navy intending to be an activist
for Indian causes. He soon after was
fighting to lead the troops on the Island, his hawkish features handsome beneath
his odd haircut – long on the sides and in back, with the top a short bristle,
like the Mohican roach. He would, by his
natural gifts as a poet and storyteller, become the single spokesman for the
group, since the news outlets insisted on putting him out in front and his work
in radio had prepared him for his ‘Voice of Alcatraz’ program on a college public
access station.
One afternoon we sat in the guard’s apartment where John’s baby
Wovoka had been born several months before.
While the infant’s pudgy fingers pulled John’s hair, the youthful
leader’s aquiline face was animated as he talked into my tape recorder about
the Alcatraz Takeover, about the Movement, about what it meant to be Indian in America
at that time.
(Marlon Brando’s refusal
of the Oscar for
The Godfather was
still three years in the future,
and no one could guess that turquoise jewelry would become all the rage in
another few years.)
At one point, John said, “Because over a hundred years ago,
they set up schools, they set up policies for Indian people, during war
conditions, while they were still ripping off our land. And the policies haven’t stopped: they still take our young away from us and
send them to schools that don’t teach.
All of our people are the most uneducated people in the country, in the
White Man’s education.”
Even now, hearing that tape makes me sad, for several
generations of Indian youths have never gotten the education that John and
others had hoped for them. John had had
high hopes, and had moved through byzantine pathways in his attempts to united
divergent tribes. He achieved the
position of National Chairman of AIM (the American Indian Movement) before his
wife and two other children were killed in a suspicious fire in Arthur
Manning’s house in Duck Valley,
Nevada. Many, including John himself, still believe
the FBI caused that fire as part of an ongoing strategy to silence attempts at
public exposure of the Bureau’s abuses of AIM and Pine Ridge. John had been warned against speaking on the
steps of the FBI Building
during a people’s march in Washington
DC, and the fire occurred within
twelve hours of that eloquent and volatile speech. But the cause of the blaze may never be
known, and others still take another view, holding the opinion that the arson
was the work of political rivals within the Indian Movement.
The Takeover was not an AIM campaign, and many people still
don’t know or understand that the American Indian Movement itself was not
involved with planning or executing the Occupation. But John
became a nationally-recognized AIM leader because of his work at Alcatraz and elsewhere.
After learning his lessons in leadership on the Island,
he achieved prominence throughout the country in a very short time and became
AIM’s last national chairman, serving from 1974 to 1980.
But for John, like many others, the Movement stalled after
his family was killed. The scores of
murders on the reservations in the Seventies effectively stopped much of the
Movement’s momentum. He was a young man
in his mid-thirties, but shattered by heartbreak. John was – and is – an extraordinary man, but
it would have taken more than ‘extraordinary’ to keep up the fight with that
much tragedy to carry around.
* * *
I’d made those journeys to Alcatraz
as a teenager, arrogant and rebellious, a middle-class university student trying
on the revolutionary’s mantle. About to
turn nineteen and green in ways that I can hardly believe today, I still possessed
more than a small fire in my belly and a profound sense of the injustice deeply
rooted in our society. A hard worker who
could also comfortably talk to people in all walks of life, I had a number of skills
– writer, ghostwriter, graphic artist, publicist, work-flow manager. But I was still just a boy – one who thought
he knew much more about the world than he actually did.
Though my grandmother was full-blood Akimel O’Odham (Pima
Bajo), my biggest flaw was sporting my ‘Indianness’ in embarrassing ways – feathers
in my hair and a habit of bringing my little quarter of Native American blood into
conversations. But my Indian blood was
nothing in the minds of ‘rez’ Indians. They’d
grown up on reservations: those poorest
ghettos of America,
administered by a backward and ineffective Bureau of Indian Affairs, where
poverty and malnutrition were commonplace, and poor health and premature death
were the expected norm. Infant
mortality, alcoholism, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy and despair were then
givens on most reservations at that time – as they still are. The suicide rates did (and still do) attest
to that fact.
By early 1970 many things had happened since the first group
of students took the Island the previous
November. Many of the Indians on the
Island – especially after the first couple of waves of students from California universities
– came from the rez penniless, hitchhiking hundreds or thousands of miles to
get there, feeling that anything was better than what they’d left behind. They watched me with some suspicion. Flaunting my tenuous connection to them like
a scalp on my belt made me an object of sly ridicule until they finally shut me
up completely by rejecting my attempts at tribal inclusion. Even the ‘urbs’ (the urban Indians, frequently
kept at arm’s length by the rez Indians for being city dwellers) viewed me with
a certain and often open contempt. There
was a general prohibition of Whites on Alcatraz
anyway, and the only reason I got out there at all that first time was that Indian
Joe Morris saw something he liked in me.
Joe was a middle-aged longshoreman, in rolled-up shirtsleeves
and well-worn watch cap, who ran the Alcatraz Depot at Pier 40. Joe’s position in the powerful Longshoreman’s
Union assured that the Occupation was taken seriously – the Union threatened to
close the Port if the Indians were removed from the Island. He was clearly tough and able to stand on his
own against all comers, but he readily showed me his gentle side. “Come on in, son – you can put that stuff
over here. Must’ve had a long ride to get
here. Want some coffee?”
The memories are still fresh: my
first time standing on the deck of the boat that chopped the swells as it slid
in to the Island’s dock, wind lifting my hair,
the exhilaration at the sight of the place.
Though I was already in awe of our tiny presence in that moment
of history, my first walk around the Island’s
twenty-two acres was still an eye-opener.
The prison itself, built in 1935 to house the hardest convicts in the
nation’s penitentiary system, was huge and quiet and spooky. In its echoes you could feel the pain and
loneliness of the thousands of lives that had passed between those walls before
it closed in 1963. Now the younger guys
showed several of us newcomers the cells and the automatic doors and, just to test
our mettle, locked us in and wouldn’t let us out for a while. Much of what we found was unexpected, and though
I had imagined in advance the prisonness of the place, I was still
unnerved by the gun towers and the bars, the musty smells and the sense of
gloom that hung over the buildings. I
did not expect the tidy gardens, the trees and plants, the quaint paths intended
to give a sense of safety and normalcy to the families of the guards and
employees. I was surprised by China
Alley, looking like some back street in Italy, and by the old Spanish-style
Warden’s House, built by the Army in the 1800s, and by the Victorian Coast
Guard Commandant’s residence.
Everywhere
was the yellowish-white and sickly-green paint.
There were echoes in the huge rooms of the voices of men who had been
caged because they couldn’t abide by the rules of ‘civilized’ society. And now we found ourselves here, (I was for
the moment comfortable to join with the young bucks in this), joking that the
place was a palace compared to the rez.
And the people that we represented, the ones we spoke for, had so very
little – so little that a disused prison was something to reach out and grab
with both hands. Of course, I had come
from someplace completely different, but did my best to fit in, feeling the
particular outrage that only the privileged can feel at the System crushing us
all.
After a while, we got
used to the beards of grey mossy lint clinging to the walls and bars and the
industrial screens of the cell blocks, got used to the dust swirling through
the ugly blocks of the guards’ apartments, got used to the chilling wind that
often seemed to be coming from all directions at once. And later, we even became accustomed to the
tomb-like quiet buildings, the hollow echoes, and the persistent feelings of
sadness and despair that still cling like the wispy fog cloaking the Rock.
Off the Island, I drank with
big John Mankiller and others down at Pat’s Place, but was not there the night the
shaggy giant pulled the foot-rail off the bar with his peninsula-sized hands and
belted some guy with it. I smoked hash
with the boys down in the dungeons, ‘hotboxing’ the low curved-ceiling brick
rooms by shutting the doors so that the only air breathed was pungent with
cannabis.
While on the Rock, I worked in the infirmary with Ruth White
Woman, a lovely long-haired elder with kindly eyes, whose gentleness made the
tasks more pleasant. When not carrying
water and gathering wood, I joined work parties, trudging up and down the Island’s hills with food and necessities. At the boats, we loaded and unloaded supplies. As an almost anonymous part of the group (it
is as hard for a White man to be anonymous among Indians as it is for an Indian
to be anonymous among Whites – but no one was asking me to join in any
conversation) I worked with the others to try to build something where nothing
of ours had been before, eventually using the time in between to interview the
group’s leaders while taking plenty of notes and photographs. As time went on, I witnessed the meetings
with corporate bigwigs who wanted to gain positive public perception by bringing
their factories to the reservations (and reap the economic benefit promised by filling
those factories with cheap labor).
My small portable tape machine recorded the words of John
Trudell and La Nada Means and others, and I took hundreds of pictures, trying
to document the whole Takeover in a few rolls of film. I learned early on when to put the camera
down and join the work. (It says
something of my luck that they decided I wasn’t an FBI informant; more than a
few people were hurt after being marked as ‘narcs.’) For almost thirty-nine years, those boxes of
slides waited for me, as I searched sporadically for the potent images from my time
at Alcatraz. After my moment of clarity and doubt on the Island in 2004, I finally found about half of them in an
attic, and they brought back strong memories of the adventure of salad days,
now long gone.
With the interviews, those slides were the centerpiece of a
show I presented back in Los Angeles in late 1970, using these ‘reports from
the front’ to collect money and donations to bring to the Rock – I’d created a
cycle of transaction, with myself as the bearer: the givers felt they were doing some good in
the world, and the receivers felt they were getting some of their own
back. I was called ‘the Come&go
Guy,’ and I was appreciated (more or less) by both groups for making those
transactions happen.
After late nights on the Rock, I’d awaken stiff and feeling
dirty, longing for a shower, then remember where I was and that there was no
running water, that a shower was hours or days away. I’d traveled here alone and was with my ‘new
friends,’ rez or urb Indians who’d grown up in the direst of poverty and now
viewed the wealth of America
with a mixture of disdain and desire.
Dirty and disheveled, they demanded a piece of the pie that had been
denied them and their families for so long, and they were definitely willing to
break the White Man’s laws to get it.
And me? I’d already learned very
well how exciting broken laws could be.
On those cold mornings, we’d step out of the commandeered
guards’ quarters, seeing the City lapped in white fog, a ghostly apparition
that emerged slightly, then faded, then reappeared briefly before disappearing
as the fog brushed past, leaving my glasses spotted and wet. We’d scrounge some food or coffee, then head
down to the dock to wait for the first boat.
Once landing at Fisherman’s Wharf, stinking of sweat and firesmoke, we’d
all trail into the yacht club, our notoriety making us a novelty to be
tolerated. Some measure of money-guilt
worked to allow us to shower and clean up in the rich man’s turf – us, the
local small-time celebrities. Some
boat-owners supported us in genuine good heart, while others were afraid of us,
afraid to try (and fail) to control us. They’d
heard the rumors, heard that we were armed and dangerous, that we stashed guns
in our vehicles and carried them on the Island.
My compatriots were all too aware of these feelings among the
‘citizens,’ and they played on and to those fears, for they risked nothing at
all. Hell, we’d taken over an old
decrepit prison, a place falling down and rusting out. And if they came to take us, it would be to
new prisons, with running water and electricity and three squares a day. And how does that song go? “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left
to lose…”
* * *
Yesterday,
on this last trip with the movie crew, I bought several books about Alcatraz,
to try to recapture some memories of my time on the Island. I talked to my friends about the feelings
that the Rock is awakening in me. I am
having the oddest hallucination too, as if I’m on a boat. Yesterday I stood on the silver roof of the
Main Cellhouse, where I hadn’t stood since the days when arrows were fired at
the tour boats that came too close to the Island (invading our ‘sovereign
waters’), and I seemed to feel the whole rock-solid building swaying like a
boat. Later at home, I felt the swaying
again. And even now, sitting at my desk
and typing these words, my body is swaying as if finding its center of gravity
to keep from falling over with the pitch from the swells hitting the hull of
the boat I am not on.
The wind and the sun worked on me for three straight days,
and the body expends a lot of energy coping with the wind. I’m sunburned and windburned, and my legs
hurt from standing on the concrete walkways and the cement roofs. But mostly, my heart hurts from the memories
of what was – and what wasn’t.
* * *
The prison itself is a strange place – made stranger by the
fact that it’s a tourist attraction now, where a thousand tourists a day pay
the thirteen bucks to ride the boat over and back. Many of them then pay for the audio tour
headsets, or they buy some of the scores of books and magazines dedicated to ‘The
Rock.’ Some folks are afraid of the
prison, but I was always slightly benumbed by the ghosts there, the echoes of
the cruelty of guards and of inmates, the whole specter of what had taken place
there, of what humans can do to each other when they ignore that we are all
sacred beings. And who would know that
better than descendants of the Great American Genocide, waged with programs
that wove through the decades – programs as diverse as disease-laden blankets,
Gatlin guns and cannon, extirpation of the buffalo, forced marches,
deculturation, benign neglect, impoverishment through corruption and
embezzlement, and finally Termination and Relocation. Who better, indeed. All my relations.
Yes, we are all sacred being, even the distorted among
us. The prison didn’t spook me, but the
social situation was hard for me, at the end of the whip-saw, sometimes being
accepted but often being pushed aside while trying to become part of the
tribe. I continued to gather donations
and money for fuel to run the generator that powered the lighthouse, and I
continued to try to give my ideas to a group I believed in but which often did
not believe in me. One amazing aspect of
the whole experience is that I was completely ignorant of many of the crucial
events taking place around me; I’d been imbrued with a non-Indian status that
left me out of the politics, the agreements, the infighting – and the
planning.
So I showed up irregularly at Alcatraz
– bearing gifts, speaking a different cultural language than the stragglers of
an entire continent’s stragglers, who had come from the reservations and from
poor urban areas. Considered ‘White,’ I had
only tenuous links with any of them. But
through it all, I turned my back on my own skills and inclination – I never
wrote my story down (or, if I did, the now-forgotten papers were lost amid
later adventures). I never bit through the
aching gums to release a bright sharp tooth that might create something other
than an interesting story to tell people who’d only heard from a distance about
the Takeover, people who will never never understand fully what went on
there and what we did – and what it meant to us, to all of us. And what we lost.
* * *
When Alcatraz fell to government agents on June 11, 1971, the
longest occupation of federal property in US history ended. Using the excuse of a maritime accident
completely unconnected to Alcatraz or its
lighthouse, federal authorities claimed the lighthouse as a strategic asset in
maintaining the safety of the Bay. A
mixed group of US Marshals, FBI agents, and other tactical forces swooped in on
boats with a single helicopter managing tactics at the time when most of the
men had left the Island. On that day, only fifteen people remained to
defend the Rock – most of them women and children.
After the end of the Alcatraz Takeover, Richard Oakes came
back to the Movement, but was killed by a PG&E guard at a demonstration up
on Pomo land in Northern California. Alcatraz
warriors, the alumni of a great educational experiment that succeeded even as
it failed, spread out to carry the message and the fight to other communities,
to other bands of fighters, to other battlegrounds. The American Indian Movement caught fire and
became to new gathering point – actually multiple moving targets that just
about any Indian in the country could find and join. AIM co-founder Dennis Banks, and Russell
Means, AIM’s first national director, later wound up having their own troubles
over Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
Having learned that ‘occupation’ was an excellent PR
strategy, Means and Banks led a group that occupied the Wounded
Knee memorial site in 1973.
That occupation, which kept our War in the papers long after the fall of
Alcatraz, focused on the trivialization of sacred lands, especially in South Dakota. In 1975, two FBI agents were murdered at the
Jumping Bull Ranch on South Dakota’s
Pine Ridge Reservation, in a situation that has been hotly debated on both
sides for more than thirty-five years. Leonard
Peltier, who was never a major figure in AIM until that moment, went on the run
after the Jumping Bull shootings, though he and many other reliable witnesses
have maintained his innocence in connection with those deaths.
In the troubled 70s, AIM followed its own troubled course,
plagued by infighting, poor leadership, bad decisions, and a government intent
on stopping its growth as quickly as possible.
It was the beginning of the end of the brightest fire of American Indian
politics. And a long end it was.
With most of the leaders of AIM harried by law enforcement
agencies, and the rest under attack by the Reservation Police and GOONS (‘Guardians
of the Oglala Nation’), the American Indian Movement died a slow death as a
political force in the late 1970s.
AIM’s potency and promise as a national organization was
strangled by internecine fighting, the pettiness of the greedy, the constant
pressure of the government, loss of emotional and political momentum, and the
lack of clear victories to keep interest in the minds of a fickle public. Perhaps more deadly was the simple ignorance
of undereducated persons who could not trust educated ones. The good and honest men and women who tried
to save the Movement were hampered by the rest – even hampered by their own
rank and file supporters, for lack of education means lack of competence,
strategic skill, and the ability to frame and articulate a cogent argument for
an often unwilling audience.
Had the women been in charge, the Movement might have
succeeded, for on the whole the women did more consistent work and carried more
true responsibility than most of the men.
But history didn’t work out that way.
Of course, AIM still exists, and does good work in communities all over
the country – but with the mainstreaming of its mission and work, AIM’s initial
fire and fierce strength are things of the now-distant past.
But this failure, the end of AIM’s strength – was it really a
defeat? Alcatraz stands as the
forerunner of many movements for indigenous and disenfranchised peoples, and
our Occupation became the model for hundreds of other occupations, including a
seven-day Takeover of the BIA Headquarters in Washington DC. Without the brave sisters and brothers I
followed out on the icy waters of the Bay, many of the social changes of the
last four decades might not have taken place.
So – a failure? I think history
will be more fair than that, but it will take some perspective for the nation
to see (and recognize) it.
* * *
I left the Alcatraz Takeover the last time at the end of
1970, heading back to school to cover my truancy with papers on the Occupation
for my sociology and poli-sci classes.
Along the way to a respectable graduation, I collected more money to
send back to Joe Morris and company for local Indian causes. But my heart was still tender, and I needed
something to help the pain I felt, for I could sense the course that events might soon take. On the Island, I’d been ridiculed for my education; my ideas had
been dismissed based on a very obvious reverse racism. I had long before let go any thought of being
a significant part of the battle, and had resigned myself to being the
Come&go Guy, the bearer of goods, that outsider bringing in the guilt-gifts
of privileged America. And the fire
inside me was dimming.
So when the woman I would soon marry walked into my life,
that wounded heart of mine almost jumped out of my body just to be closer to
her. Alcatraz had almost faded from my vision
when the boats filled with gunslingers landed and the helicopter touched down
to remove the last of the Warriors from the Island. The Movement was slipping, and there were
other causes calling us all. Late in the
Indian Spring of 1971, the Vietnam War still threatened a couple of generations,
and my focus was pulled in several directions.
That moment of distraction changed the course of my life, and
I lost something that I wouldn’t notice fully until all these years later – until
I was standing on the roof of the Cellhouse in the midst of the crew of an
expensive Hollywood movie, desperately trying
to keep my balance. And on that day,
thirty-five years after my time on The Rock, it was as if a whole piece of my
life had been swept away by the wind, and gone with it any witness to all that
living, all that hard work, all that hopeful idealism. Around me there was no one who knew what I
meant when I spoke of those bright days of my past, and the brilliance that we
had hoped to attain there. And I heard
Joe Morris’ voice, echo Ambrose Bierce:
“You were either there or you weren’t – if you were there, you don’t
need the words, and if you weren’t there, then no amount of words will
do.”
In the grand events surrounding the Alcatraz Takeover, I’d
been a very minor participant – an extra player, not very important in the
whole scheme of things. But that small
walk-on part had been a crucial piece of my own life, giving me a perspective
that shaped events for decades to come.
In the years that
followed my involvement at Alcatraz, I became increasingly aware that I had
dropped into the Movement for a short while and then had dropped out,
encouraged to leave by many kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle messages from my
comrades in the struggle and from the world that carried on beyond it as if the
Movement did not exist. I was well aware
that the responsibility for each of my actions was mine alone, but life moves
us swiftly on, and Alcatraz was soon just one more part of my crowded past.
* * *
At the 30th Anniversary celebration on the Island in
1999, they called for all the Alcatraz
Warriors to come forward and be recognized, and I stepped up to take my honor. Jackson Brown played that day and John
Trudell spoke about the continuing struggle for all indigenous peoples. John is older now, a kind of outlaw rock
star, a man with a dedicated following. His
lost family is long behind him, and he has a new family – and he too is no
longer the fiery young man he once was.
But in the place of that fierce young warrior is an elder, still fierce,
a tough mature man, and he still sings the sacred song, still dances the holy
dance – and the step is wider now, the words more informed, and the story is
the record of all people oppressed by circumstance, a story we can all listen
to and from which we might derive some wisdom and consolation.
On that Thanksgiving
Day in 1999, the feelings hadn’t yet started to rise up in me: the sunrise celebration kept my doubts
away. I had known for many years that
John Trudell was right when he said, “And you can stereotype and call us lazy,
and you can call us drunks, and you can call us ignorant – you can call us many
things. And this society does it; they do it through movies and the films on TV
and their books. But we didn’t have any
of that before the White Man came. So
it’s not that it’s an ingrained thing within our people, and yet your history
books insinuate to our young that their people are inferior.”
But then, a few years ago, listening to that tall friendly
ranger while setting up to film the City across the water in the wind-scattered
rain, the feelings came sparking up: my
participation in the great myth-spieling machine that is Hollywood, my small responsibility
in the building (and the failure) of the Movement, my own seeming abandonment
of the youthful ideals I’d once held, and the feelings of deep loss, of the
passing of time and the terrible knowledge that it never comes back, that the
dead are dead and that we will continue to walk with the memory of them in our
hearts until we can no longer walk ourselves.
Yes, years later on Alcatraz, a place of so much sorrow, I found
my own loss… the hot-hearted youth that slipped away from me in the misty fog
that shrouds that lonely Island.
* * *
I
received my first vision on Alcatraz at
nineteen, down in the ancient brick dungeons with peyote pressing at the backs
of my eyeballs. I still carry my
medicine spot on the cheekbone, tattooed below my right eye. I may have left the Movement, dissuaded from going
to Wounded Knee, and I did let myself slip back
into the White world. I have lost some
of the fire in my belly, but I am proud to have been – and to be yet – an
Alcatraz Warrior. I still keep the path
clear before me, sharing what I have as a member of a tribe, a clan, living
among the beings of the earth.
All my relations.
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