"The liberal people of San Francisco [and] Oakland, the Bay Area ... they loved what we were doing because we
used satire and humor," Fortunate Eagle, now 80, recalled.
The press covered the occupation, and the
public began delivering supplies by boat -- ignoring the blockade,
he said.
The FBI intended to remove the occupiers, but
the White House told it to back off and ordered an end to the
blockade, Johnson said. In time, other Native Americans would join
the occupation, with the high population point coming on
Thanksgiving 1969, with 400 people, Fortunate Eagle said.
Fortunate Eagle's daughter, Asha Nordwall, was
15 at the time. She said she remembers staying at the island on
weekends, choosing for fun -- as other kids did -- to sleep in the
old penitentiary's cells while adults generally slept in buildings
meant for the prison's staff.
"We were just kind of happy to be a part of all
these Indians coming from everywhere," Nordwall said.
The population changed over time, with
newcomers from across the country boating in and veterans
departing. One of them was now-TV and film actor Benjamin Bratt,
who as a child arrived with his siblings and mother, who is a
Quechua native from Peru.
"Forty years later, Native people still
recognize the occupation for what it was and remains: a seminal
event in American history that brought the plight of American
Indians to the world's attention," Bratt and his brother Peter
said in a statement.
"It's easy to pass off the Alcatraz event as
largely symbolic, but the truth is the spirit and dream of
Alcatraz never died, it simply found its way to other fights," the
Bratt brothers said. "Native sovereignty, repatriation,
environmental justice, the struggle for basic human rights --
these are the issues Native people were fighting for then, and are
the same things we are fighting for today."
In January 1970, Oakes, the leader on the
island, left for good after his stepdaughter fell down a stairwell
to her death, Johnson wrote in an account of the occupation posted
on the National Park Service Web site for Alcatraz. Oakes himself
would die in a shooting unrelated to the occupation in 1972,
Johnson said.
In 1971, authorities decided to end the
occupation by going in when the group was at its smallest. Police
and federal agents removed 15 people on June 10, nearly 19 months
after the occupation began, Johnson wrote in the online account.
The occupiers didn't get their demands. But
President Nixon ended the U.S. tribal termination policy in June
1970, while they still were on the island. This was a result of
the public spotlight that the occupation put on Indian issues,
Johnson and Glassner said.
"It might have happened anyway, but Alcatraz
had the attention of the nation, and it led to those changes being
initiated in the White House," Glassner said.
Today the island is part of the National Park
Service, hosting hundreds of thousands of people for tours each
year.
Fortunate Eagle, who now lives on a reservation
in Nevada, said the occupation was the most significant event in
Native American history since the 1876 Battle of the Little
Bighorn: "It brought the Indian issues to the forefront of the
public awareness."
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