alone, hoping that the difficulty of life on the island without amenities would force them to surrender. But the Indians had quite a bit of support in their occupation—financial as well as moral. According to Johnson, it is impossible to know exactly how much money was donated to the cause because of poor record keeping, but estimates range from $20–25 million. Donors included musicians with names as big as Malvina Reynolds, Creedance Clearwater Revival, and the Grateful Dead.
Needless to say, the Indians were fiscally free to do as they pleased on the island, as all of their basic needs were taken care of by donations. One component of life on Alcatraz included establishing schools and health clinics for the island’s residents, but the other component included a spectacular and involved show of force in island security and defense—the “Bureau of Caucasian Affairs.”
The Indians engaged in small-scale warfare by tossing Molotov cocktails at the Coast Guard boats and shooting arrows and stones at passing ferries in response to passengers’ obscene gestures and remarks. The ferries often then neglected the 200-yard perimeter request and slammed the Indians’ boat against the pilings. The Indians also dotted the former prison’s recreation yard with over thirty garbage cans stuffed with gasoline-soaked rags to be lit in the event of a helicopter invasion.
Such an invasion did arrive on June 13, 1971—nineteen months after the occupation began. Public opinion of the occupation had waned as a result of the Indians’ flagrant disregard for government authority, as well as the unrelated collision of two Chevron oil tankers in the bay, which dramatized the need for serious government stewardship of nearby waters. Further, internal dynamics on Alcatraz had soured, and the infighting was a disappointment to supporters, who then abandoned the cause. Without public protection, the fifteen remaining Alcatraz residents no longer enjoyed a public-relations shield around their island. And with elections coming in November, no politician wanted the pesky “symbol” of the Alcatraz occupation muddying up power campaigns—and so the government used this window of time to finally stage the eviction.
While the government appeared patient to wait nearly two years to move on Alcatraz, they were all the while bitterly stewing and growing increasingly agitated by the Indians’ antics. Robert Robertson, one of the government negotiators, claimed (reminiscent of statements historically made about Indians) that “reason is a commodity [the occupiers] want nothing to do with—they are emotionally charged, naïve and not used to responsibility. All they want is the island and an unending flow of money to do what they want, whether what they want has any chance of success or not. Their attorneys are good only for throwing fuel on the fire of unreasonableness.”[47]
The GSA was of the mind that if the Indians wanted to stake a claim on the island, they might do so only through the standard channels of legislation. Within that system, any Indian claim would be mired in legislative bureaucracy and eventually fizzle. The Alcatraz occupation was a physical manifestation of indigenous power and played outside of the established rules for challenging title in the United States; this legitimately frightened authorities. In July 1970, President Nixon actually made a speech repudiating the government’s past treatment of Indians and pushing for “self-determination over termination.”[48] As a gesture of good faith toward Native peoples, he returned the Taos Blue Lake, in New Mexico, to the Taos Indians who had been fighting for the lake’s return since the U.S. government seized it in 1906.[h]
The Indians’ visceral threat to government agencies and to the U.S. understanding of property was met by Janus-faced authorities: One response was to act sympathetic, as Nixon did in 1970, and to ride the coattails of pro-indigenous movements in order to maintain popularity in the polls; the second response was to aggressively and semi-surreptitiously attack the threat using force, as agents did in 1971, sending a message of intolerance toward ideas of proprietary dissent.
Three hours after the White House gave the green light, three Coast Guard vessels, one helicopter, and twenty to thirty armed U.S. marshals cleared the island of people in less than thirty minutes. They took six men, four women, and five children into custody. The media were not notified nor allowed on site.
Vicki Lee, a thirty-year-old Shoshone Indian from San Diego, said to the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, “My little girl said they held a gun to her chest and she asked, ‘Are they going to kill me?’ and my son hid under the bed but came out when they put a gun to his head. I don’t think my husband should carry arms for the U.S. [in Vietnam] when his children are at gunpoint at home.” She finished by declaring, “We will return to Alcatraz. If not Alcatraz, someplace else. We are prepared to die.”[49]
Although the Indians of All Tribes were eventually strong-armed by the U.S. government, Vicki Lee was right: The movement’s fuse had been lit, and demonstrations and occupations were exploding all over the country in what became known as the Self-Determination Era. In 1970 alone, inspired by the actions on Alcatraz Island, Indian groups staged invasions, occupations, or general protests at Fort Lawton, Washington; Fort Lewis, Washington; the BIA office in Denver; Ellis Island; the BIA office in Alameda; Pyramid Lake, Nevada; Rattlesnake Island, California; Middletown, California; Stanly Island, New York; Belmont Harbor, Illinois; Lassen National Forest, California; Hiawatha National Forest, Michigan; Tacoma, Washington; Mount Rushmore; Burney, California; Badlands National Monument, South Dakota; Davis, California; Santa Rosa, California; Healdsburg, California; Wohler Bridge, California; Plymouth, Massachusetts; and the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.
Some actions were as creative as Richard Oakes’s unsanctioned toll collection on through-roads of a Pomo Indian reservation in California. Rifle in hand, he stopped motorists and charged them a dollar for passing through Indian land. Oakes was arrested and initially charged with armed robbery but eventually let go on the promise that he would cease his toll collections.[50]
In the years following the Alcatraz occupation, dozens of similar demonstrations persisted. The trend of militant indigenous actions in the 1960s and ’70s was not the product of innately savage minds, as many government figures from colonial to recent times have asserted. It was the result of centuries of trauma induced by an abusive paternal government who gave Native peoples few options but resistance. Walter Prescott Webb wrote in The Great Plains that “when men suffer, they become politically radical; when they cease to suffer, they favor the existing order.” This truth extends not only to the sordid history of Native Americans, but also to white settlers who were later subject to similarly discriminatory understandings of property.
The Indians of All Tribes claimed their land by right of discovery—by virtue of having been there first—but the U.S. government claimed their portion of North America by “title by genocide.”[51] Property law was a nasty game, and until Indians could play dirty on the level with colonizers they would never retrieve the land they had lost during the primary years of imperialism.
That said, in 1983, the Connecticut Pequot tribe legally and bureaucratically re-annexed an acreage of their original land base in accordance with the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act. Local whites were furious. Then-Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman called the move “welfare for the rich,” as three years later the Pequots would go on to own the lucrative Foxwoods Casino in southeast Connecticut. Steve Kemper complained in Yankee Magazine, “Tribes like the Pequots have reached the point where land annexation is not about preserving a culture or achieving self-sufficiency. It is about expansion of an already successful business in a way that harms their neighbors.”[52]
Whether or not this is an accurate assessment, white policy makers in the third richest state in the country still found reason to feel victimized by the Pequot tribe. After all, if Indians weren’t a people of the past to pity for their poverty, then they were legitimate competition for capital. As Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. wrote in The White Man’s Indian,
Since Whites primarily understood the Indian as an antithesis to themselves, then civilization and Indianness as they defined them would forever
