One weakness as an anthropologist that I have had has been a failure to make plans for the possibility that someone might ask me details about my life twenty-five years later. Separation of Research, as problem-oriented attention to important people doing important things, from Life, my day to day activities, meant that even as I was in the midst of important historical events, I never thought that my part in them was worth Describing for Posterity. So on this occasion of remembering and memorializing a watershed in the history of Native American survival and resistance, I have only a few random notes to help organize memory of my participation in the events of Alcatraz and before. Much was happening at that time, and I was willy-nilly in a position to be a small part of processes that I didn't know would be as important as hindsight shows.

Actually, in order to get a good picture of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, we have to go back to the first occupation, in 1964, and follow the threads through the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State University (then College).

When Alcatraz was decommissioned as a federal prison, the property entered into an administrative limbo that threatened to inspire lawyers and frustrate developers. Contemplation of this administrative limbo also inspired some Lakota residents in the Bay Area to examine documents relating to Lakota-US Government relations. Convinced that the wording in certain parts of the Great Sioux Treaty of 1868 and in the Indian Allotment Act of 1887 supported their claims, five Lakota men went to the Island and formally staked their claims, and after four hours returned to the mainland to pursue their legal cases. The five men who staked their claims were Al "Chalk" Cottier, a house painter from Pine Ridge who had been in the Bay Area since 1952, Dick McKenzie from Rosebud, who was active in the urban Indian community, Garfield Spotted Elk, a 26-year old section hand on relocation, Walter Means, a retired traveling high iron worker, who was helped in this endeavor by his son Russell, and Martin Firethunder Martinez, who had come to Oakland in the late fifties on relocation, and was a focal person in the urban Indian community. Chalk's wife Belva Cottier did most of the legal research. At a meeting the next evening at the American Indian Center on 16th and Julian Street, the "homesteaders" said that although they were staking the claims as individuals as the law required, they actually had plans for a community center and a refuge and healing place for Indians, in addition to their private holdings. Although they offered to pay the US Government the highest price set for Indian land -- 47 cents per acre -- their case never went to court, and was forgotten by a fickle public, if not by the Lakotas and their friends, relatives and associates.

The five homesteaders and their numerous friends staked their claims on Sunday, March 8, 1964, under the hostile eyes and words of the Federal Government representative on the island. On the same day negotiators reported the end of a long sit-in at the Sheraton Palace that resulted in a non-discriminatory hiring policy; the week before, Bob Satiacum (Puyallup) was arrested for exercising his treaty fishing rights in Washington (San Francisco Episcopal Bishop JA Pike's aide, John J Yargan, and actor Marlon Brando were also arrested with him).

Fast forward now to 1968, during the Third World Liberation Strike at San Francisco State University. A number of the faculty had been supporting the student strike, and in December of that year, went out on strike themselves. No identified American Indians were participating in the strike or negotiations at this time, and no plans for a Native American Studies Department were part of the goals of the strike. However, a non-Indian graduate student in Social Science at San Francisco State College was tutoring young Indian children in the Mission district, and came to know a group of young Indians who also congregated at the place where the student was tutoring. These young Indians had all had some contact with college, and had come to San Francisco either on Vocational training, Relocation, or on their own, and had formed a club modeled after motorcycle clubs, wearing "colors" that identified them as "Indians and Half Breeds of San Francisco". Conversation with the student tutor led to interest in the Strike, and in exploring the possibility of participating and working toward a Native American Studies Department.

By the time that the Indian aspirants decided to work seriously toward these goals, the University and the Third World Liberation front had started negotiations, and there was limited room for movement or expansion. The La Raga section agreed to represent them in negotiations, and there was close collaboration between representatives of La Raza and the future Native American Studies students. I was one of the faculty on strike, and although I wasn't involved with negotiation with the University administration, I was informally recruited by other striking faculty to help plan and negotiate with La Raza. There were no identified Indians among the faculty involved in these negotiations, and at least I had spent some time in research on Indian issues in the San Francisco Bay Area and on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

As a result of the strike, Richard Oakes, (Mohawk), Al Miller (Seminole), Gerald Sam (Round Valley) Joe Bill (Inuit), Deanna Francis (Malecite,), Mickey Gemmill (Pit River), Robert Kaniatobe (Choctaw), Ronald Lickers (Seneca), Joyce Rice (Winnebago), and others were admitted to SFSU as the core student body of the Native American Studies Department (now called American Indian Studies Department). These Indian students who were building and inventing the Native American Studies Department chose me to aid in this process and in the transition to Native American faculty because of my role in the off-campus negotiations. (As far as I know there was only one Native American professor, in physiology.)

Richard Oakes was the major thinker and actor in this process. We had set up a community advisory board, including Jeanette Henry (Cherokee) and Rupert Costo (Coahuilla), founders of the American Indian Historical Society and well known Indian intellectuals, and Belva Cottier, who had done most of the legal and historical research for the earlier Lakota landing on Alcatraz. As a non-Indian, I was spared most of the political maneuvering and conflict that accompanied the planning of the program and the search for Native American faculty. I only faintly perceived the negative reaction from some of the principals, including Native scholars who had been approached to participate, who perceived the program as "political", "radical", and "mixed blood."

It was evident from the discussions we had together during the formation of the NAS Department that Oakes had a lot of respect for these people, and that he listened to them. I also benefited from these discussions. One time Oakes returned from a conference with Rupert Costo and Jeanette Henry and said to me, "You anthropologists just think of Indians as bugs, don't you." Immediately I had to make explicit to myself as well as to Richard Oakes my perception of the relationship between Anthropology and Ethnic Studies.

This was something to the effect that, yes, anthropologists, as they are students of humans and their culture in all times and places, and as they try to formulate generalizations about human culture and behavior, do think of Indians as "bugs", as they think of any and all cultures, societies and people , including white middle class and the power elite, as examples of humanity to study. In the process of gaining information for their generalizations, they may well gain information and insights that can contribute to the aims of the particular Ethnic Studies discipline, and certainly their research should be guided by the needs and direction of the people they study. But the material is going to be interpreted and evaluated differently by those working in a pan-human context and those who are serving the consciousness and self-determination of a particular group. These ends aren't mutually exclusive; in an atmosphere of mutual respect they can be mutually beneficial. Since that time I think these ideas have become givens, and the base for much more sophisticated thinking. In 1969 we were still groping toward systematic statements if this kind, and actions based on them.

These discussions around the founding documents went on during Spring and Summer of 1969, and that Fall semester we instituted the first class, Native American Studies 20, Native American Heritage, which I taught -- nominally, because, again, there was no Native American faculty available at the time (this situation was rapidly changed, much to my relief). We set up the class as a forum to talk about directions that the Native American Studies Department could possibly take, and as a place where Native American students could examine the various traditional academic disciplines to discover what in their content and methodology could be useful in the development of Native American Studies as a discipline. On the first day of class over a hundred students appeared. I passed out a sign-up sheet and told the students to write their name, tribal affiliation and class level on the list. Somebody asked what to write if they had no tribal affiliation, and I answered that in that case they could not take the class, since it was for Indians only. The non-Indians left and we set to work, all of us having vague ideas about what would constitute a curriculum and course content, and all of us wanting to use this course time to work on these questions (A list of all the members of the class is appended.)

A few weeks into the semester, Richard Oakes got word that the White Roots of Peace, an Iroquois Confederation group, was going to be in the area. Acting on his advice, I arranged for them to appear in my class, and also arranged for appearances at Mills College and at UC Santa Cruz, where I had taught in Native American Studies courses, at UC Berkeley, I think, and also a public appearance at SFSU. White Roots of Peace had been traveling all over the country appearing in Indian communities primarily, and their message was for Indian communities, not necessarily for non-Indians. Their influence on American Indian students at UCSC and at SFSU was electrifying, to say the least. After their appearances at SFSU, Richard Oakes especially, but also other Indian students, voiced a dissatisfaction with the structure of college education, with the enclosure in glass and concrete, and the separation from the land and the water and the air of natural Indian environments. He, and others also, said that the structure and content of white people's education was irrelevant to Indian experience and needs (I'd like to think that it wasn't just my class they were upset with, and that they were taking other classes too).

Richard Oakes and the cadre from San Francisco State University were the main organizing influences, and on an evening shortly after the first (9 November) occupation, I was at a meeting of friends of the Native American Studies Department at the home of John Connelly, professor of education. Belva Cottier was there, and she said that, as in the previous Sioux occupation she was sworn to secrecy and so couldn't talk about it before it happened. She had advised Richard Oakes and friends about how the "Sioux had done it in 1964, and about the legal and historical research she had done, and also the dreams and plans that the Sioux and their friends had developed to go with the claims. (In those days people rarely used the word "Lakota" when speaking English, and referred to themselves as "Sioux"; "Lakota" was used when speaking Lakota.) She also said that she and the other elders who had helped the students in their plans were prevented from accompanying them on the landing, and that she was disappointed and sad about that although she would understand why the young people would want it that way. According to her, the young people said that the action was too dangerous to include the elderly people, and besides it was the job of the young people to do these actions, the job of old people to advise and support.

Native American students from other campuses were involved in the planning and occupation of the island, and literally within hours after the first occupation people from all over California and North America were responding to the action, and more than 80 young people landed on Alcatraz early in the morning of the twentieth of November, 1969. But it is important that the crucial role of Native Americans students at San Francisco State in the Alcatraz affair be recognized, and I want to honor Belva Cottier and the other Lakota pioneers in this movement. My role in this was minor and peripheral. At the, time I thought that the action was quixotic and a lot of energy expended for ephemeral and will-of -the-wisp goals. I didn't have any idea that it would have the historical importance that it did. (The week before, more than 100,000 people marched in San Francisco to end the war in Vietnam.) Fortunately and naturally, I didn't tell anybody this, since it wasn't my business to evaluate goals and strategy. I was in some way a faculty support for the Native American Studies Department, so I continued to support them in an action that they understood better than I. Alcatraz was a very complex experience, and it touched and transformed many people. This is only one of many views.