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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

Occupation of Alcatraz

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On Nov. 26, 1969, just before Thanksgiving Day Indians of All Tribes, issued the following press release indicating the seizure of Alcatraz Island. The 4-page press release reprinted by the Journal of American Indian Education in 1970 indicates that Alcatraz Island will be used for several Indian institutions including: 1. A Center for Native American Studies 2. An American Indian Spiritual Center 3. An Indian Center of Ecology 4. A Great Indian Training School 5. Creation of an American Indian Museum
LaNada proposes cultural center on the first anniversary of their occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, 20th November 1970. The occupation was a 19-month long protest when 89 Native Americans and their supporters occupied Alcatraz Island from 20th November 1969 to 11th June 1971 when the United States Government forcibly ended the protest. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Native 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.”
Reporter Cecilia Pedroza interviews a Native American man named Dennis Hastings about the group of Native Americans occupying an abandoned Nike missile base in northern California. The group began their occupation on Alcatraz and moved to the base after U.S. Marshals took control of Alcatraz. Pedroza asks about the reasons for the protest and how life on the base is different from life on Alcatraz. Hastings gives a variety of reasons for the protest, including proving their case to the government that they own the land (Alcatraz Island), and wanting to bring back their religion and spiritual ways. Learn more about this UCLA Film & Television Archive project: ucla.in/1SONCuw © 2016 The Regents of the University of California