Alcatraz Island

12 Key excerpts on "Alcatraz Island"

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  Composing Place

  Digital Rhetorics for a Mobile World

  • Jacob Greene(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Utah State University Press

    (Publisher)

  As the Cellhouse Audio Tour demonstrates, mobile writing technologies have the capacity to affect visitors’ somatic memories of a site, which in this case functions to reinforce a public experience of Alcatraz as an icon of carceral nostalgia and state power. As Doreen Massey (2005) notes, nostalgia not only reduces the complexities of space into static, disconnected eras, but also serves to “[rob] others of their histories” (124). Massey describes how this “deprivation of a history” occurs through practices of “stabilisation,” writing that when we reduce spatial complexities to surface-level nostalgia “we hold them still for our own purposes, while we do the moving” (122). Indeed, nostalgia is a powerful rhetorical (and economic) resource in the interpretive construction of iconic spaces. The Cellhouse Audio tour solidifies the island’s reputation as “Hellcatraz” by foregrounding the presentation of material objects and spaces related to the most sensationalized elements of its history (Strange and Kempa 2003, 391–92). At one point during the audio tour, the narrator directs visitors to gaze at bullet holes from Frank Morris’s infamous 1962 escape. Through this, visitor interactions with Alcatraz perpetuate the notion that the island’s primary historical and cultural significance does not extend beyond its function as a notorious federal prison.

  However, Alcatraz’s use as a federal prison is not the only significant element of this site’s history. On the walkway up to the main prison house where the audio tour takes place, tourists pass by a large water tower emblazoned with the phrases “Peace and Freedom,” “Home of the Free,” and “Welcome Indian Land.” At the foot of the tower stands a small informational placard explaining that the water tower graffiti, as well as graffiti on other parts of the island, are remnants of the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz. The Alcatraz occupation was an effort by the activist group Indians of All Tribes to reclaim the island as Indigenous territory in the wake of the prison’s closure in 1963. Where others in the Bay Area saw a barren rock ripe for commercial development, American Indian activists saw an opportunity to reclaim the island as a site for Indian education, cultural development, and self-determination (Johnson 1996, 25). However, after months of harsh living conditions, growing government hostility, and irregular access to basic resources, the occupation came to an end in the final months of 1971. As Casey Ryan Kelly (2014) notes, the Alcatraz occupation may not have achieved its political goals of reclaiming Alcatraz, but the historic event had a significant rhetorical impact on the nature of Indigenous activism in the United States by uniting various tribes around a shared cause and paving the way for other American Indian movements across the country (169). In this, the Alcatraz occupation participated in what Romeo García and Damían Baca describe as “border epistemology, a space from which to cultivate an-other

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  Icons of American Architecture

  From the Alamo to the World Trade Center [2 volumes]

  • Donald Langmead(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  That picture was deliberately created by the “New Dealers” in the 1930s in response to the nation’s question, “What are you doing to protect us from rampant crime?” and fostered and embellished by Hollywood and tabloid newspapers. Alcatraz is among a number of erstwhile prisons throughout the world, now tourist attractions, which appeal to our morbid fascination with crime and punishment. Each reflects what a society was and how it changed. As will be shown, Alcatraz is twice iconic: not only an intimidating former prison, but a symbol of freedom for Native Americans. Alcatraz’s meaning has changed several times, whether by political will, by social manipulation, or by the power of the people. That meaning is as com- plex as its colorful history, and the stylistic and functional diversity of its archi- tecture is almost irrelevant. During 160 years of U.S. government occupation the island has been also a lighthouse station (its only continuous nonindige- nous association), an artillery emplacement, a military stockade, a political symbol for Native Americans, and a national park and bird sanctuary. Although it was America’s version of Devil’s Island for less than one-fifth of that time, it is the notorious federal penitentiary looming out of the fog on the “grim, tide-gnawed rock” that is an icon of American architecture. THE YEARS WHEN LITTLE HAPPENED Alcatraz is a waterless rocky island, 1½ miles offshore from San Francisco Bay’s northern marina. Rising precipitously to 130 feet above sea level, it is about 19 acres in area and at its widest approximately 500 feet across. It was visited—but never occupied—by the indigenous Coastal Muwekma and Alcatraz, San Francisco, California 27 Costanoan people (aka Ohlone, “people of the west”) who settled nearby grassy and wooded Angel Island about 2,000 years ago. Then, as now, Alca- traz was a rookery for many species of seabirds and thus a source of eggs.

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  Escape to Prison

  Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment

  • Michael Welch(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  In the face of more than a century of govern-mental silence on the plight of the American Indians, curators at Alcatraz invite tourists to engage in some worthwhile conversation on the subject. Still standing on the dock, we view a photograph (c. 1969) of a teepee with the San Francisco skyline in the distance. The caption quotes Richard Oakes (Mohawk), Indian Occupation spokesman: “It would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world entering the Golden Gate would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation.” Once inside the exhibit hall, visitors step into a gallery titled “We Hold the Rock: The Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, 1969–1971.” An entire wall is covered with a group shot photograph (c. 1970) of American Indians crowded inside the main corridor of the former penitentiary. The picture seems to capture a moment of both newfound solidarity and defiance. Again, the words of Richard Oakes are superimposed: “This is the beginning of our fight for justice and self-determination.” Visitors are welcome to sit on a bench and watch four different videos that describe the American Indian Movement as it unfolded at Alcatraz. Deepening the scholarly narrative, a FIGURE 24. An official government sign scrawled with Native American graffiti (c. late 1960s) greeting visitors stepping onto Alcatraz Island. © retrowelch 2014 C O L O N I A L I S M A N D R E S I S T A N C E • 211 detailed storyboard chronicles the main developments in the occupation of Alcatraz.

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  Dark Tourism in the American West

  • Jennifer Dawes(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Sociologist and cultural studies scholar Jacqueline Z. Wilson is keen to remind readers of her book Prison: Cultural Memory and Dark Tourism that, “Far from being ‘merely’ sites of suffering, with connotations of human being in extremis as their main draw card, sites recognizably fitting the Dark Tourism model are usually multi-layered historically and sociologically, and from those layers disparate groups and identities derive subtly nuanced, diverse ranges and meanings.” 6 Wilson makes the point that with Alcatraz specifically two distinct interpretations are equally valid: the site exists as both a symbol of brutal incarceration practices and pre-twentieth-century indigenous dispossession. 7 Responsibilities of representation come to bear a greater significance in a place like this. Another, more complex, ethical dilemma is then raised when the issue of “whose story” to tell as the dominant narrative of a place is adjudicated. 8 With Alcatraz’s current situation as a prison museum—as a story-telling institution that produces a tale about itself and its place in history 9 —there is a burden to effectively capture and accurately convey the multiple meanings and interpretations that remain valid. To highlight only a single aspect of a place with such layered significance does a disservice to the alternative memories and cheats tourists of a fully educative experience. Instead, I would argue that Alcatraz needs to be understood as a site of contested memory. There is a responsibility to effectively convey more of the island’s history than its use as a Federal Penitentiary. For nineteen months from 1969 to 1971, a Native American group under the name Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island in support of the reclamation of the land by Native people. The exclusion and suppression of the Indians of All Tribes narrative, perspective, and spatial significance eliminates the possibility of conveying a fuller picture of the island’s history

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  Resonant Violence

  Affect, Memory, and Activism in Post-Genocide Societies

  • Kerry Whigham(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Rutgers University Press

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER 5

  Occupying Space, Amplifying Affect

  THE AMERICAN INDIAN OCCUPATION OF Alcatraz Island

  M OST OF THE 1.4 million people who visit Alcatraz Island each year are not going there to learn about the occupation. Some have forgotten about it. Some have never heard of it. Either way, when they board one of the Hornblower Hybrid ferries that will take them to the 22.5-acre hunk of rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, there are most certainly more people thinking about Capone and the Birdman than Richard Oakes and the Indians of All Tribes. Even as the ferry pulls up to the island’s dock, where visitors are greeted with the remnants of graffiti from the occupation, declaring, “Indians Welcome” and “Welcome to Indian Land,” it is the prison that draws them. Bypassing the tiny, secluded room that offers information on the occupation, visitors watch the obligatory historical video about the prison, then head for the headsets. As they tour the cellblock, the gruff voices of former prison guards bark terse imperatives through the earbuds, telling them where to go, what to do: “Walk forward to cell number 24!” “Turn left and enter the next room!” The guard-guides speak of wardens and convicts, gangsters and jailbreaks. They speak of the fourteen times prisoners conspired to escape from the island. They do not speak of the one time, over fifty years ago, when a group of people plotted to break into the fortress, to take it over, and to stay there for over a year-and-a-half. For twenty-nine years Alcatraz operated as the most infamous prison in the U.S. imaginary. But it was only after the prison closed down that a group of people would sequester themselves on that uninhabitable rock and, in doing so, push forward the wheels of political change in a way that the prison’s former inhabitants could have only dreamed.

  The American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island of 1969–1971 was not the first occupation of the island. That took place in March 1964, about a year after the prison closed. Five Lakota-Sioux Indians chartered a boat and landed on the island, citing the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed by the United States’ government with the Lakota-Sioux nation. With this treaty, the Sioux were granted the Black Hills of South Dakota as their reservation—that is, until less than a decade later, when settlers discovered gold there. Article VI of the treaty noted that any surplus federal land occupied by Indians for a certain period of time would automatically revert to Indian ownership. When the federal prison of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, California, was decommissioned and declared surplus federal property in 1964, these young American Indian activists saw an opportunity.

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  The National Council on Indian Opportunity

  Quiet Champion of Self-Determination

  • Thomas A. Britten(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of New Mexico Press

    (Publisher)

  According to LaNada Means (Shoshone/ Bannock), “We took the island because we wanted the federal government to honor our treaties and its own laws.”24 Scholars have likewise reached different conclusions about the inspira-tion for the occupation. Some believe the immediate catalyst was the October 1969 fire that destroyed the San Francisco Indian Center. Bay Area Indian organizations and student groups needed a new meeting place, and since Alcatraz was available, they selected the island as a possible new venue.25 Historian Steven J. Crum maintains that Indian students selected Alcatraz because the island mirrored current reservation conditions: insufficient run-ning water, inadequate sanitation facilities, an absence of health care facili-ties, and poor, rocky soil that was unsuitable for farming. He interprets the occupation as part of a larger effort to establish an Indian college or univer-sity.26 Anthropologist Steve Talbot argues that the Alcatraz occupation evi-denced the emergence of a “culture of Native American liberation” that encouraged Indians to “sever the bonds of their oppression and take control of their own destiny.”27 When viewed in this light, Alcatraz was an impor-tant symbolic effort to publicize the plight of Native Americans and their continuing struggle for sovereignty and self-determination. Others cast the occupation’s impetus in much larger—even millennial—terms. Mohawk poet and artist Peter Blue Cloud wrote, “We came to Alcatraz with an idea. We would unite our people and show the world that the Indian spirit would live forever.” According to Vine Deloria Jr., many Indians regarded the island’s capture as a “demonstration of pride in being Indian” and as “the beginning of a new movement to recapture the continent and assert tribal independence from the United States.” The less idealistic set their expecta-tions a good deal lower.

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  Encyclopedia of American Indian History

  [4 volumes]

  • Bruce E. Johansen, Barry M. Pritzker, Bruce E. Johansen, Barry M. Pritzker(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  A group called the Indians of All Tribes occupied the island until 1971. (Bettmann/Corbis) 289 Occupation of Alcatraz Island of the well-known Indian activist Russell Means; and Dennis Banks and George Mitchell, founders of the American Indian Movement. Richard Oakes, the founder of Indians of All Tribes, led the main occu- pation of Alcatraz Island. These young American Indians formed the nucleus of the first Indian supra- tribal organizations. As Stephen Cornell points out in his book, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence, “their politics was often con- frontational and explicitly supratribal” (Cornell, 1988, 198). Alcatraz Island soon materialized as a place with which all Indians could identify. In a proclama- tion presented to T. E. Hannon, director of the California division of the General Services Adminis- tration (GSA), the occupiers stated that “it [Alcatraz Island] was isolated from modern facilities and without adequate means of transportation, it had no fresh running water, inadequate sanitation facili- ties, no oil or mineral rights, no industry, and no health care facilities. The soil was rocky and non- productive, the land would not support game. There were no educational facilities, the population exceeded the land base, and the population had always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others. The Island was therefore equivalent to reservations set aside by the federal government for Indian people.” The occupiers’ intent was to claim unused Federal land based on the provisions of the Sioux Treaty of 1868 (which allowed the Sioux to occupy any abandoned military base but did not specify where those bases had to be, although later court action found that the treaty applied only to unused federal land adjacent to the Sioux Reserva- tion in South Dakota) and to construct a university for American Indians as well as an Indian cultural center.

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  Red Land, Red Power

  Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel

  • Sean Kicummah Teuton, Donald E. Pease(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  With bitter irony, they announced their discovery of a new uninhabited land and declared their right to re-main by a treaty delineating a fair purchase of the tiny, worthless island: “We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery” (Josephy, Nagel, and Johnson 1999, 40). The protest statement exuded a new intellec-tual rigor that would characterize the Red Power movement. Red Power Indians presented a darkly humorous inversion of the deplorable state of Indian Country to encourage white Americans to view Native life more as Native people did. Movement organizers began by interpreting their experiences of colonialism on reservations, which they represented as thinly disguised prison camps designed to confine and control Indige-nous people. As they looked around their world, they began to see their poverty not as the fitting consequence of their hapless lives, but as politi-cal subjugation enforced by an occupying power. In their proclamation, the Indians of All Tribes made explicit their formerly vague feelings of 6 IntroductIon hopelessness—their “imprisonment”—by audaciously declaring Alcatraz prison an appropriate site for a future Indian reservation: We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian Reservation, as determined by the white man’s own stan-dards. By this we mean that this place resembles most Indian reserva-tions, in that: 1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation. 2. It has no fresh running water. 3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities. 4. There are no oil or mineral rights. 5. There is no industry so unemployment is great. 6. There are no health care facilities. 7. The soil is rocky and non-productive; and the land does not sup-port game. 8. There are no educational facilities. 9. The population has always exceeded the land base.

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  The Prison Cell

  Embodied and Everyday Spaces of Incarceration

  • Jennifer Turner, Victoria Knight, Jennifer Turner, Victoria Knight(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Its nickname, the Rock, is apt, since topographically the island is a drowned mountain, with only a thin strip of dirt that supports little flora and fauna (Jarvis 2004). Some of the USA’s most notorious prison were incarcerated here from 1934 to 1963 under the premise that Alcatraz’s watery surroundings would make the prison impossible to escape from, although there were in fact 14 documented escape attempts involving 34 prisoners: 23 were recaptured, 6 were shot and killed, but 5 remained unaccounted for. The authorities insisted they must have drowned (Jarvis 2004). In addition, prison folklore held that the waters surrounding Alcatraz were shark-infested. Tales were told of a shark named ‘Bruce’, said to have been raised with only one fin by the Bureau of Prisons in order that it would swim continually around the island waiting for its prey (Babyak 2001). The significance of the surrounding water for the prisoners themselves is not something that features prominently in the performance of the site as a destination for penal tourism. 1 Curators have paid attention to the value of the sea in aiding air circulation around the crowded cell block and commented on the chill brought by inclement weather. However, the view—which may be taken from most windows in the building—features less in the narrative of the prison’s history. The impacts that a sea view might have had on prisoners are difficult to garner from the prison’s archives, but it seems likely that the cold and dangerous waters surrounding Alcatraz could only have exacerbated the pains of imprisonment experienced by its inmates

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  For This Land

  Writings on Religion in America

  • Vine Deloria, Jr., James Treat(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Attaching themselves to the power movements when these were at their zenith, the Indians were welcomed into the mythological coalition that was to bring about the revolutionary changes which the civil rights movement had failed to engender. The possibilities of protest on a group basis were first discerned in the Poor People’s March of 1968. This of course represented a negative value in that all its participants lacked economic power. Solving the problem of poverty would have required a more or less immediate redistribution of wealth, and the political and economic changes such a program would have involved posed a threat to white America. But though its results were meager, the Poor People’s March did suggest that the group could wield positive power. Hence Indians were accepted by non-Indians primarily because they were seen as adding leverage in the pursuit of power.

  It was in the following year, 1969, that Indians emerged in the media. The capture of Alcatraz provided a symbolic center for the Indian protest, but the message of Alcatraz failed utterly. Basically, Alcatraz raised the question of land, first in the political and property sense of ownership and second in the larger sense of the relationship of land to communities and, ultimately, to religious understanding. The result of Alcatraz was hardly comforting to Indians. They never received title to the island. White society simply evaded the whole problem by harking back to the days of Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph. People were damn sorry about the depredations of the past, but they could not recognize the depredations of the present because they could not go beyond the first step of the land question. The Christian religion had little to say concerning land and nature: it was an otherworldly religion which boasted that it was in the world but not of it. Failing to understand the Indians’ relationship to the land, non-Indians saw Alcatraz as nothing more than a symbolic defiance of the federal government—in which nearly everyone had lost faith anyway. Thus they responded to the Indian protest by allowing Indians to have their day in the media sun. Oceans of pitying tears flowed down, but no waters of righteousness. The mood of white society seemed to be one of sadistic fairness: we have hurt them; now we must let them hurt us.

  No wonder that Indian activists went wild. Between 1969 and early 1972, they took over piece after piece of federal surplus property, declaring that they had rights to it under the 1868 Sioux treaty. Invariably, charges of disturbing the peace and inciting to riot were lodged against them, though eventually they were able to negotiate amnesty on these. Their movement was at once exciting and boring. Would they one of these days uncover a piece of property that the federal government might give them? Yet watching another group of Indians on the evening news claiming another abandoned federal lighthouse grew wearying. In their own minds, the Indians’ escalation of their demands and the increasing violence of their protest recalled the days of Indian glory. To the white society, the protest was novel because of its intensity.

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  The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature

  • Deborah L. Madsen(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The modern assertion of Native American civil-rights protest had actually begun with “fish-ins” near Puget Sound during the middle 1960s when most of America woke up to it with the Alcatraz occupation five years later. In 1968, the American Indian movement was barely a blip on the national radar when it organized to protest police brutality in Minneapolis. For the next decade, however, its members convulsed America’s conscience with a series of high-profile events that raised issues of treaty rights and economic injustice.

  The occupation of Alcatraz has been abundantly covered as history (“Alcatraz and Activism”; “Alcatraz”; Johnson 1999, 2001; Johnson & Nagel; Shreve; Smith & Warrior; Talbot). Largely ignored outside its own region, a similar confrontation at Fort Lawton, in Seattle, produced what the Alcatraz occupation sought but failed to achieve: an enduring community center (KCTS n. pag.). The Fort Lawton site, on park land in the midst of the Seattle urban area, was much more practical than an island in San Francisco Bay. The island site was ideal for isolating people (thus the prison). The Daybreak Star, the center built in what is now Discovery Park, was the opposite: close to the city, and easy to reach (Parham; Reyes).

  After Alcatraz, a nation-spanning caravan, the Trail of Broken Treaties, traversed the country from three locations in the West (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle) during the autumn of 1972, arriving in Washington, D.C. days before elections, and barricading the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters. Months later, early in 1973, the hamlet of Wounded Knee was occupied on the Pine Ridge reservation. In 1976, another caravan, the Trail of Self Determination, crossed the country. At the same time, the U.S. government undertook a series of legal prosecutions to break AIM apart and increase factional infighting that resulted in the murders of Anna Mae Aquash and others at and near Pine Ridge. At least 66 AIM members and supporters were killed at or near Pine Ridge between 1973 and 1976 with very little attention from federal officials, who are responsible for investigating major crimes on U.S. Indian reservations.

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  Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society

  • Richard T. Schaefer(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Source: Time & Life Pictures. These institutions would be used to improve the lives of American Indian people through education and tra- ditional spirituality, the activists said. They would also inform non-Indians about the tragedies and triumphs of Native American history. During the 19-month occupation, an intertribal community emerged that was both outwardly focused on affecting political change and inwardly focused on instilling a lost sense of pride in American Indian people and engendering an activist identities based on supratribal objectives and values. For its part, the fed- eral government was fairly relaxed in its dealings with the occupiers. In June 1971, however, after negotia- tions between activists and the government fell apart, federal agents removed the remaining protestors from Alcatraz. Although the activists’ objectives were not met, the effects of the occupation on future Red Power activism were significant. For one, the tactics used at Alcatraz inspired Red Power activists to continue using property seizures as a primary strategy for attracting public attention. Perhaps more importantly, Alcatraz rekindled a sense of dignity and hope among Native American people and inspired a generation of young activists to join the struggle for political and cultural self-determination. The Trail of Broken Treaties In the autumn of 1972, a caravan of Native American activists set off on a journey from California to Washington, D.C., known as the Trail of Broken Treaties. One purpose of the journey was to capitalize on the enthusiasm created by the Alcatraz occupation to mobilize support for the Red Power Movement in Indian Country. Another purpose was to present the activists’ demands on the national stage.

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