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1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: A young brave from New Mexico at a Thanksgiving feast on Alcatraz Island
1media/Screen Shot 2022-10-26 at 4.09.17 PM_thumb.png2022-10-26T23:11:16+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a4911A young brave from Nogales, New Mexico, at a Thanksgiving feast on Alcatraz Island on November 27, 1969. For Native American students at San Francisco State University and other schools around the Bay Area, the protests and strikes at University of California, Berkeley during the 1960s, were a glimpse into how political activism could begin to address the injustices Native people had long suffered. In meetings at San Francisco’s American Indian Center and Warren’s, a bar in the Mission District’s “Little Res,” a plan was hatched to take over Alcatraz Island, whose world-famous prison had recently been decommissioned and its land declared “surplus.” The siege of Alcatraz officially began on November 20, 1969, with two major goals — to agitate for Native American self-determination and sovereignty and to establish a Native American cultural center, museum and college on the island. In the 1960s, War Jack says, “just to identify yourself as a Native person would bring immediate discrimination and racism. [Alcatraz] helped us re-establish our self-identification as Native people. People developed pride.”plain2022-10-26T23:11:16+00:00November 27, 1969Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49