mainstream culture. As a result of this unanimous “House Concurrent Resolution 108” in August 1953, approximately 109 tribes were eliminated and 1,262,155 acres of land were affected.[23]
The stated goal of the Relocation Program was to provide an escape for Indians from the extreme poverty of life on the reservation,[c] but it was a gambit on the part of the government, who stood to gain additional federal land from natives, as well as the bonus of Indian assimilation.
Having been transplanted from the lives they knew to the hustle and bustle of the city, many indigenous people found the urban environment disorienting. For the first time in their lives, they had to budget money and practice fiscal responsibility—foreign concepts to members of tribes that shared nearly everything. And general planning for the future seemed wasteful to peoples accustomed to living in the present.[24] Their accommodations in the poorest parts of town and their jobs often unskilled labor (if they found work at all), these relocated natives entered into a poverty cycle that precluded them from ever moving ahead economically—despite the stated mission of the program.
Socially, Indians were subjected to racist attacks from people in every sector of society, from police officers to school teachers. In schools, young Indians were barred from speaking their traditional languages, from wearing their traditional clothes or hairstyles, and from practicing their traditional religions. On the streets, police harassed, beat, and arrested natives systematically.[25] Many whites, having never seen indigenous people before, acted in xenophobic outbursts, exemplified in U.S. Army captain Richard H. Pratt’s statement that “the only good Indian is a dead one…. All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”[26]
This degradation of community reinforced assimilation and the abandonment of natives’ cultural identities. According to Troy R. Johnson, “Cultural destruction and alienation were inevitable. With their familiar culture lost to them, Indians thus found themselves caught between two conflicting impulses: the economic necessity that caused them to leave the reservation and the cultural and emotional ties that made them want to return to the reservation.”[27]
The Urban Relocation Program persisted into the late ’60s, but it should not be understood that indigenous peoples showed no resistance to their cultural genocide during that time. Perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most notable, instance of native resistance came in the form of the Alcatraz occupation. Fed up with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA),[d] a group of San Francisco Indians unknowingly started a movement with their Alcatraz takeover, one that inspired a domino chain of demonstrations by indigenous people across the country.
Following the fire that destroyed the San Francisco American Indian Center on October 28, 1969, a group of fourteen Indian youths—mostly college students—decided to occupy the abandoned Alcatraz Island as a gesture of self-determination. The U.S. government had closed the island’s prison facility in 1963, hoisting the responsibility of its maintenance onto the General Services Administration (GSA) at a cost of $100,000 annually. The island sat abandoned but guarded by lonely caretakers until this group of natives (who came to call themselves the Indians of All Tribes[e]) recalled an action that had happened five years earlier:
On March 19, 1964, a small group of Sioux men “invaded” and “claimed” the island in accordance with an 1868 Sioux treaty,[f] which entitled the tribe to any surplus government land. They declared:
Under the U.S. Code we as Sioux Indians are settling on Federal land no longer appropriated. Because we are civilized human beings, and we realize that these acts give us land at no cost we are willing to pay the highest price for California land set by the Government—47 cents per acre. It is our intention to continue to allow the U.S. Government to operate the lighthouse, providing it does not interfere with our settlement.[28]
The 1964 group only stayed on the island for a matter of hours, dancing in the shadow of the lighthouse and running around “laying claim to various parts of the island, just as the many whites who had come to our land had claimed our rivers, forests, hills, and meadows. For a few exhilarating hours,” wrote Russell Means, “I felt a freedom that I had never experienced, as though Alcatraz were mine.”[29]
When U.S. marshals arrived, the occupiers went home to file paperwork with the Bureau of Land Claims in Sacramento. Indeed, this was meant less as a media ploy (albeit partially) and more as a serious attempt to bureaucratically acquire title. “This is no uprising or any such wild plot. We’re entitled to the land free under the law,” said Richard McKenzie, one of the occupiers. “We feel the rights given to the American Indian should and can be exercised.”[30]
U.S. Attorney Cecil Poole stated that no charges would be brought upon the group, as they hadn’t done any damage to the property during the “invasion.” He then jokingly said that if the government wanted to punish the five men, it “might actually make them stay” on the island, which was isolated, windswept, and chilly.[31]
In 1965, when the U.S. government began holding public hearings on how Alcatraz should be developed, McKenzie filed an injunction against the sale of Alcatraz. He argued that he should receive title to the property as well as a judgment of $2,500,000 or the assessed value of the island. An answer was filed in February 1966, and the injunction proved unsuccessful. On May 15, 1968, Attorney General Ramsey Clark informed Senator Edward V. Long that the Department of Justice had “concluded that there is not any legal basis for the claims of the American Indian Foundation or similar groups to Alcatraz.”[32] Three weeks later, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California threw out McKenzie’s case for “lack of prosecution.” The federal government asserted that the occupation had been nothing more than a sophomoric publicity stunt and therefore carried no legal weight.[33]
Inspired by the stunt, in 1969, as indigenous rage over the dispossession of land and heritage was reaching a boiling point, a militant Mohawk named Richard Oakes burst onto the American Indian activist scene. In the following years he would participate in dozens of occupations, and he became a household name during the two-year-long Alcatraz takeover.
Only three months after the Summer of Love, on November 9, 1969, Oakes and forty other Bay Area Indians took the island in the name of the Indians of All Tribes and claimed it under the Doctrine of Discovery. And this time, they promised, they wouldn’t leave so easily. Richard Oakes and Adam Nordwall were frequently pegged as the “leaders” of the occupation because they were often the most visible to the media, but both maintain that the movement had no official leader.[34] Collectively, the Indians of All Tribes released this derisive tongue-in-cheek statement, chiding white colonizers for their treatment of natives both past and present:
To the Great White Father and All His People:
We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty: We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for 24 dollars ($24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white mans’ purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these sixteen acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we offer that land values have risen over the years. Our offer of $1.24 per acre is greater than the 47 cents per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land. We will give to the inhabitants of this land a portion of that land for their own, to be held in trust by the American Indian Government—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea—to be administered by the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs (BCA). We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion,
