American Indian Culture and Research Journal

One weakness that I have had as an anthropologist has been a failure to make plans for the possibility that someone might ask me details about my life twenty-five years later. I am in the habit of keeping my research (problem-oriented attention to important people doing important things) separate from my life (my day-to-day activities); so, even when I was in the midst of important historical events, I never thought that my part in them was worth describing for posterity. Thus, on this occasion of remembering and memorializing a watershed in the history of Native American survival and resistance, I have only a few random notes to help me organize my memory of my participation in the events of Alcatraz and before. Much was happening at that time, and I found myself willy-nilly in a position to be a small part of processes that I did not know would be as important as hindsight shows. Actually, in order to get a good picture of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, we have to go back to the first occupation, in 1964, and follow the threads through the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State University (then College). When Alcatraz was decommissioned as a federal prison, the property entered into an administrative limbo that threatened to inspire lawyers and frustrate developers. Contemplation of this administrative limbo also inspired some Lakota residents in the Bay Area to examine documents relating to Lakota-U.S. government relations. Convinced that the wording in certain parts of the Great Sioux Treaty of 1868 and the Indian Allotment Act of 1887 supported their claims, five Lakota men went to the island and formally staked their claims; after four hours, they returned to the mainland to pursue their legal cases.