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1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Native and Indigenous elders from throughout the country joined the young occupiers of Alcatraz Island for a meeting
1media/Screen Shot 2022-10-26 at 3.36.05 PM_thumb.png2022-10-26T22:36:18+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a4911Native and Indigenous elders from throughout the country joined the young occupiers of Alcatraz Island for a meeting they said was the most important since the ‘Ghost Dance’ days of the 1880s. When, in 1956, the Bureau of Indian Affairs launched yet another assimilationist policy, the Indian Relocation Act, the intention was to further undermine Native communities by moving youth from Indian Reservations to urban centers throughout the West. Instead, the opposite occurred. Native people began, for the first time, to find support across tribal lines among the more than 100,000 relocated Indigenous people who shared similar histories of Indigenous identity and cultural survival… 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.”plain2022-10-26T22:36:18+00:00December 23, 1969Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49
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12023-03-17T21:38:45+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49Occupation of AlcatrazGina Leon151970s Focused Researchgallery2023-12-22T19:12:03+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49