Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, CA 94133
Beyond the kitschy “I Escaped Alcatraz” T-shirts for sale at every tourist shop in San Francisco lies the story of the immensely brutal beginnings of federal maximum-security prisons, and, not unrelated, of the center of a powerful moment in the American Indian struggle for self-determination.
If you visit, you’ll be regaled with stories of how the federal government locked men in cages, with notoriously poor living conditions and strict control by violent guards. You’ll be asked to find a thrill in imagining yourself locked up with “America’s worst criminals.” You’ll join the company of about 1.4 million people that annually visit the island, now under the control of the National Park Service. Indeed, alongside trolley cars and the Golden Gate Bridge, the prison-island is among the best-known icons of the San Francisco Bay.
Throughout its modern history, Alcatraz has been a site of interwoven moments of tragedy and revolutionary resistance by Indigenous people. The first two American Indian prisoners known to be incarcerated there were part of a group of Modoc leaders captured by the US Army near the modern California-Oregon border. In the 1890s, Alcatraz caged a group of Hopi men who had refused to send their children to federal schools (where their language and culture would be ripped from them) and refused to abandon their own collective agricultural practices for US-style private property. The traces of these histories took on a different valence in the 1940s when the federal government implemented an official set of policies of terminating recognition of Native communities and demanding complete subsumption into US society.
In 1964, when the future of the island as federal property was uncertain, Sioux activists occupied Alcatraz for four hours to demand that it be turned into a Native university and cultural center. Five years later, a group using the moniker Indians of All Tribes, organized by Richard Oakes (Mohawk), returned to the island for one day to declare a similar set of demands. Reinforced by nearly a hundred other activists, including many college students from UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center, they returned again later that month to launch an occupation that would last nearly eighteen months, from November 20, 1969, to June 10, 1971. For over a year, the occupiers ran a consensus-based community on the island with widespread local and national support. When federal agents swarmed the island to forcibly remove the last fifteen people, the symbolic work of the occupation had already been immense. It made the continued existence of Indigenous communities as an autonomous group demanding self-determination visible to mainstream US society, while galvanizing the “Red Power” movement in connection with the emergent Black and Brown Power and Third World Left movements.
The National Park Service, to its credit, has preserved and promotes the history of the occupation as part of the island’s history in both interpretive material at the park and on its accompanying website—though in uneven and frequently problematic ways. Native activists and supporters continue to gather at Alcatraz on Thanksgiving and Indigenous Peoples’ Day (still “Columbus Day” in many places) for sunrise ceremonies. They insist that stories of Native American resistance are not just historical traces to note in a museum. These are significant moments in five centuries of defiance against settler-colonial genocide, and they continue. The island is accessible via ferry from San Francisco, located at Piers 31–33, Embarcadero and Bay Street, San Francisco.