The Inconvenient Indian (17 page)

I say “we” in the generous sense of the word. I wasn’t even in North America. In 1964, I had signed on with a tramp steamer out of San Francisco and worked my way across several oceans to New Zealand. I worked in that country as a deer culler, a beer-bottle sorter, and a photographer. I might have stayed, but I had entered New Zealand on a thirty-day tourist visa, and after I’d lived and worked there for about a year, immigration noticed that, while I had arrived, I hadn’t left.

I was in Auckland when I got a phone call. A fellow with a very British accent asked me if I was aware that I had been in the country for almost a year on a thirty-day visa. I told him I was aware of this. Had I been working? he wanted to know. A little, I told him.

“When might we expect you to leave?”

As I said, I liked New Zealand, and I was keen on staying longer, so I asked if there was a way I could apply for an immigration visa.
The immigration man said that this wasn’t normally the way it was done, that one generally applied for such a visa before arriving in the country.

“But I shall look into the matter,” he told me.

In the meantime, he wanted some particulars. And then he read off a list of items. Height, weight, colour of eyes, colour of hair. Race.

“Six-foot-six, two hundred and fifty pounds, brown, black. Indian.”

There was a long pause and then the immigration man said, “Oh dear, I’m afraid we can’t accept an immigration application from you.”

I was somewhat taken aback. “Why not?” I wanted to know.

“Well,” said the immigration man, “we don’t accept immigration applications from Indians.”

I tried to imagine just how many immigration applications New Zealand could possibly get from Indians in any given year. So I asked. “How many immigration applications do you get from Indians?”

“Thousands,” said the immigration man. “Thousands.”

The Cree were a good-sized tribe. So were the Navajo and the Lakota. There were lots of Native people in Oklahoma, Alberta, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, and British Columbia who might want to settle down in New Zealand. “These Indians,” I asked, “where are they coming from?”

“New Delhi,” said the immigration man. “Bombay.”

“Ah,” I said. “Wrong Indians. I’m North American Indian.”

There was another long pause. “What?” said the immigration man. “You mean like cowboys and Indians?”

I didn’t get a visa. I left New Zealand, went to Australia, worked there for a couple of years, and in 1967, I returned to
California. By the time I arrived home, the Vietnam war was in full swing, while throughout North America, marginalized groups were taking to the streets to protest both the war and the institutions and the social structures that assisted the rich in the accumulation of wealth and power, that kept the poor knee-deep in poverty, and that allowed racism to flourish. In Canada, Quebec separatism was gathering strength, but the country’s focus was on celebrating the centenary. In Montreal, Expo 67, the most successful of the world fairs, opened its doors.

That year, 1967, was the one historian Pierre Berton called “Canada’s last good year.”

In the United States, 1967 wasn’t quite so dazzling. Well, there was the whole hippie thing. Flower power, free love, tie-dyed T-shirts, Haight-Ashbury, drugs and communes and young men and women dressed up as Day-Glo Indians. I guess that was
somewhat
dazzling. But by 1968, the dazzle had begun to fade.

That year saw the assassination of Martin Luther King in April and the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June. In August, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, police clashed with demonstrators opposed to the war and determined to end it. Meanwhile, in Canada, in June of that year, separatists rioted in Montreal on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, while politicians in Ottawa passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which decriminalized homosexuality and allowed abortions and contraception. This was the bill that Pierre Trudeau defended by saying that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” In that year, Leonard Marchand became the first Status Indian to be elected to the House of Commons.

It was also the year that N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa-Cherokee) won the Pulitzer Prize, the first and only Aboriginal author to
do so, while in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was slouching towards Wounded Knee.

For me, 1968 was the year I enrolled at Chico State University, in Chico, California, and became involved in Native activism. There were hardly any Indians on campus. The only other Native I remember was a Mohawk, an artist named Richard Glazer Danay. Richard and I got together with a professor from the Anthropology department to form what I think was the first Indian organization on that campus. But my memory for those years is terrible. The only thing I remember with any real clarity is a survey.

Neither Richard nor I had any idea how many Indian students were on campus, but, in 1969 or 1970, the registrar’s office included a brief survey in the packets of all incoming students that allowed them to declare ethnicity. When the surveys came back, there were about sixty incoming students who had marked the “Indian” box. I was ecstatic. I had been hoping Chico State might have a dozen Indians, and here we were with five times that many. So Richard and I began calling the students to say hello, to welcome them to Chico, and we discovered that the vast majority of the students who had marked “Indian” in the box were not Indian at all. “I’m not actually Indian,” one student told me, “but I support you guys one hundred percent.”

That was the way it was in the late ’60s and early ’70s in North America. Everyone wanted to be an Indian. Even the Indians.

In 1969, many Native people weren’t really aware of what was happening in Indian country. Those of us on campuses throughout North America liked to believe that we were up to date, but our knowledge was limited by our background and experience. Universities didn’t offer “Indian” courses. We knew what we knew
in bits and pieces, and I suspect that this was equally true for Indians on reservations/reserves, in cities, and in rural areas. Momaday winning the Pulitzer in 1968 was certainly a source of pride, but I’m not sure many Native people actually read
House Made of Dawn
. The book we did read was Vine Deloria’s
Custer Died for Your Sins
(1969). We knew about AIM, of course, without knowing exactly what the organization did. Indian role models were few and far between. In 1969, they were the usual suspects, individuals who were—for one reason or another—on public display in the consciousness of White North America. Sitting Bull, Louis Riel, Crazy Horse, Big Bear, Jim Thorpe, Tom Longboat, and Billy Mills.

Then, on November 20, 1969, eighty-nine American Indians from a variety of tribes set sail from Sausalito, a boutique town for wealthy folk just across the bay from San Francisco, and took over the defunct federal prison known as Alcatraz. Or “the Rock.”

It wasn’t the first time Indians had been on the island. Native oral stories from the area tell of Alcatraz as a place where people gathered bird eggs, and as a sanctuary to escape the Franciscan monks, who used Indians in California as slave labour in the building of their missions. Some of the tribes in the area regarded the island as a holy place. Others avoided it altogether.

Whatever else the island might have been, by the early 1860s Alcatraz was a prison, and in 1895 the U.S. government shipped nineteen Hopi Indians to the Rock. An article in the
San Francisco Call
reported that the Hopi had been arrested because “they would not let their children go to school.”

A capital offence, to be sure.

The
Call
went on to assure its readers that the Hopi (whom the paper had earlier misidentified as “murderous-looking Apaches”)
were not badly treated. “They have not hardship,” said the paper, “aside from the fact that they have been rudely snatched from the bosom of their families and are prisoners and prisoners they shall stay until they have learned to appreciate the advantage of education.”

Exactly what that advantage was, the paper did not say.

The Hopi, by the way, weren’t the first Indian prisoners on the island. In 1873, a Native man named Paiute Tom was sent to Alcatraz from Camp McDermit in Nebraska. He didn’t stay long. He was shot dead by a guard two days after he arrived. In that same year, two Modoc, Barncho and Sloluck, were sent to the Rock. In 1874, Native rights activist Sarah Winnemucca’s brother Natchez (Paiute) spent a couple of less-than-pleasant weeks in the prison, while a Chiricachua Apache chief named Kaetena wound up on the island in July of 1884, courtesy of the old Indian fighter General George Cook.

Nor was the 1969 occupation the first time Native people had “captured” Alcatraz. In 1964, a group of Lakota had landed on the island and claimed it in a peaceful demonstration. They were removed by federal marshals before the day was out.

So, even before the armada landed on the island in 1969, Alcatraz and Indians already had a long and mixed history together. Still, the 1969 event was an electrifying moment. Talking about taking action was one thing —and there had certainly been enough talk—actually doing something was another thing altogether. Action. The takeover of Alcatraz was action.

That is not to say that the takeover was the most well-organized action. No one, it seemed, had thought much about the matter of clothing, food, blankets, toilet paper, potable water, items that might be needed for an extended stay on the Rock.

From an aesthetic point of view, Native people would have been
hard put to come up with an uglier or bleaker piece of geography to occupy. Weather on the island could be windy, cool, warm, clear, foggy, and rainy all on the same day. The Rock was grey, the buildings were grey, the sky was grey, the ocean was grey. Even in bright sunshine, even without being locked up in a cell, Alcatraz was depressing.

Several clever protestors suggested that the reason Indians took Alcatraz was because it looked and felt so much like a reservation. In fact, as Helen reminded me, the original “Alcatraz Proclamation” listed the similarities:

On the positive side, Alcatraz did have some lovely rock pools and a resident colony of western gulls, cormorants, and egrets. More than that, the views of the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge were to die for.

Still, it was an island, which meant that people and goods had to be ferried across San Francisco Bay by boat. And because it was an island, and a small one at that, it should have been an easy matter for the authorities to seal it off, cut the water and power, and force the Indians off the Rock before the second week was out.

But that’s not what happened. Maybe it was the times. Maybe it was the crazy magic of San Francisco. Maybe people were looking for a diversion to take their minds off the war in Vietnam and the My Lai massacre. Maybe it was a little of all of these. Whatever the reason or reasons, Alcatraz became an instant
cause celèbre
. While the Indians were struggling with organizing and outfitting the occupation, while the government was trying to come up with a plan to evict the “pesky redskins,” famous people were lining up to visit the island. Hollywood stars such as Jonathan Winters, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dick Gregory, and Candice Bergen came to Alcatraz to show their support. Many gave money. No one knows how much money came to the occupation. Records of donations were not all that tidy. Horace Spencer, who sat on the Alcatraz council, estimated the amount of money donated at between twenty dollars and twenty-five million.

Ironically, Alcatraz the media event was, in many ways, more successful than Alcatraz the occupation. In spite of problems with resources, in-fighting, and the constantly changing population, the occupation lasted almost nineteen months. But it was effectively over much earlier than that. There were too many people on the Rock, and there were too few. Some were committed, some were looking for a free lunch. Even with the adrenalin of enthusiasm, the environment was harsh, the conditions austere. There was no
consistent plan, no consistent leadership, no continuity. The media quickly tired of the event in the way that the media always tire of such things, and many of the celebrities who had flocked to Alcatraz found other worthy moments and other worthy causes that held the promise of network coverage and camera crews.

This is not to impugn, in any way, the commitment of people such as Richard Oakes, LaNada Means, Stella Leach, Joe Bill, John Trudell, Ed Castillo, Denise Quitaquit, and Ross Harden. The occupation simply had too many loose ends and loose cannons to succeed.

And yet succeed it did. Not in its attempt to occupy the island and turn the facilities into a cultural park, or an institution for Native American Studies, or a spiritual gathering place, or an Indian foundation for ecology. Rather, the occupation turned Alcatraz into an emblem of Native resistance and pride.

Vine Deloria, Jr., said it well: “Alcatraz was a big enough symbol that for the first time this century Indians were taken seriously.” Certainly the episode caught the government’s attention, though I suspect that Alcatraz was forgotten a month after the island was cleared. But I like to imagine that Deloria wasn’t talking only about the politicians in Washington. I like to imagine that he was talking about Native people taking ourselves seriously, that for perhaps the first time in a long time, we were able to see what might be possible with imagination, commitment, and a little organization.