white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the white men.[35]
The group was removed from the island twice, and on November 20 they went back a third time, this time with a group of eighty-nine Indians. Most were college students, but the cluster also included half a dozen children between the ages of two and six, and a few married couples. The Coast Guard was alerted to this invasion attempt and prevented the boat from docking—but Oakes and some others jumped overboard and swam to shore. Upon arriving, they informed Glenn Dodson, the spooked and frenzied caretaker, that if he cooperated, the Indians would create a Bureau of Caucasian Affairs and appoint him the head of it. Dodson agreed, noting that he was one-eighth Indian himself.[36]
When the island’s chief security officer, John Hart, who had been away on vacation, returned to Alcatraz, he appeared amicable to the Indians’ presence as well. “As long as you’re here, you might as well be comfortable,” he said, and directed the Indians to the buildings with working plumbing, alerting them to some of the hazards of the deteriorating landscape. With that, the Indians made themselves at home on the island, preparing for what would be a two-year stay, though they didn’t know it at the time. They painted giant “no trespassing” signs, including one that read “You Are Now on Indian Land” and another that read “Warning Keep Off Indian Property” (an alteration from the original sign, which had read “Warning Keep Off U.S. Property”).[37]
The Indians of All Tribes’ reasoning for the long-term takeover seemed sound: “How are we to be charged with trespassing on the white man’s land when the white man has taken all of this land from us?” they asked.[38] “If a one-day occupation by white men on Indian land years ago established squatter’s right, then the one-day occupation of Alcatraz should establish Indian rights to the island.”[39]
The U.S. government’s response to the occupation was cautious. Though the event had quickly exploded into a national domestic crisis, officials wanted to be sure that they handled the situation prudently. In light of some recent public-relations disasters, such as the My Lai and Kent State Massacres, the government did not want to react violently to the occupation and risk further blood on their hands. Instead, they employed a Coast Guard blockade. If occupiers were unable to receive shipments of food and supplies, then eventually the government would have starved them out. But officials underestimated the tenacity, the militancy, and the overall cunning of the occupying force.
Supporters would trick the Coast Guard by sailing alongside other boats in the bay and then surreptitiously toss provisions onto the Alcatraz barge, which was docked on the island. When this happened, the Coast Guard would blare its sirens and chase the boat away. While they were pursuing the first boat, a second boat would slide up to the barge and unload supplies. Occupiers also dealt with the blockade by creating diversions such as starting fires or throwing firebombs along one shore of the island while a canoer slipped up onto the other side to unload food donations from people on the mainland.[40]
Eventually realizing that the blockade was ineffective—and potentially counter-productive, as it appeared to call more attention and favorable publicity to the occupation—the government lifted the blockade on November 24. The government’s new plan was to wait until it could negotiate a compromise with the Indians of All Tribes or until the Indians left on their own. They hoped for the latter.
Five months into the occupation, the government was engaged in constant, sweaty-browed negotiations with the occupiers, who were enjoying an increasingly favorable public opinion. And there was no shortage of publicity. News of the Alcatraz occupation stretched across the country and around the world. The Indians had supporters as far away as Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, and Japan. They received hundreds of letters of support and inquiries about how to help.
A telegram from Japan read, “Stay with it getting world wide recognition.”[41] In broken English, Monique Schoop of Zurich, Switzerland, wrote an impassioned letter that, though muddled, did not lack conviction: “At the moment, we have a lot of difficulties with the justice because of the former demonstrations, etc., but I think that nevertheless we finally shall win. We have to fight with their own [arms? ILLEGIBLE]—with the law, not against it, against the citizen and the government! Hang them with their own laws!!”[42]
The occupiers even received a letter from a sixteen-year-old girl in Indiana offering to do whatever she could to help, claiming that there is “clearly no such thing as justice.” Most notable though is a letter from an eleven-year-old Finnish boy named Petri Rajama who tells the Indians that his mother is helping him write the letter in English. It read, in part, “I would be very happy if I would get a letter from an Indian boy telling me about life on the island.... It would be nice to know are you living in a wigwam?” The letter was accompanied by an eerie black-and-white photograph of a stern-looking pale blond boy slumped in a chair, wearing a jean jacket and an Indian headband with a single feather poking out the top. His look is severe, as if, despite his age, he maintains a comprehensive understanding of all the world’s oppressive circumstances. His eyes gaze intensely at the camera as if to tell the Indians, “I understand your plight, and I am in solidarity with you.”[g]
Remarkably, all of these correspondences arrived in the hands of the Indians despite such lazy and incomplete mailing addresses such as “To the Indians of the Island Alcatraz, Western U.S.A.” and “The Indians, Alcatraz, SF, CA.” The occupation had gained such notoriety that even the postal service knew how to readdress and deliver their mail. In this light, the Alcatraz occupation could be considered one of the most famous, massive, and overall effective squatting efforts of modern times. Not only did the Indians capture the attention of the Nixon Administration, but they also had leverage in their negotiations—one factor that allowed the group to maintain their space on the island for nearly two years.
After five months on Alcatraz, the government offered to turn the island into a federal park with an emphasis on Indian culture, if the Indians would end the occupation. There was no deadline for a response to the offer, and the squatters would not be removed if they said no. So the Indians refused the offer, stating, “We will no longer be museum pieces, tourist attractions, and politicians’ playthings…[and we do] not need statues to our dead because our dead never die.”[43]
The government was getting frustrated. The Indians of All Tribes were receiving so much publicity and so much public support that a removal or intervention of any kind would bring to bear a domestic crisis. Even the Hell’s Angels offered their “assistance” in the event of a government raid on the island. Further, according to island caretaker Don W. Carroll, there were now thirty-five pistols, rifles, and shotguns in a makeshift arsenal on the island. Shortly after receiving this report, the GSA removed Carroll and the two other caretakers from Alcatraz because of safety concerns. The GSA claimed that it would make no attempt to evict the Indians because “their demonstration has been peaceful and has not disrupted normal government operations.”[44]
But the government was quietly concerned about the Indians’ use of narcotics and the numerous firearms on the island. Having removed the caretakers, government agents realized another strategy to expedite the Indians leaving on their own: They cut the island’s supply of water, as well as its phone and electricity, leaving the group as castaways on a rock without standard means of survival. It was the authorities’ hope that Alcatraz would, in this instance, again become the prison that it once had been.
In response, hundreds more Indians made their way to the Rock for a powwow and to set fire to many of Alcatraz’s historic buildings “in defiance of a country that had turned its back on their proposal.”[45] They also burned the dock to prevent the Coast Guard from landing and silencing their protest. The San Francisco Examiner wrote of the incident, that it “might be called the battle of the redskins versus the red faces; the pale faces are becoming red with embarrassment.”[46]
After
