History Week! The Native Americans Occupy Alcatraz

Is it National-Know-Your-History week?  Nope, but I am going to write about history anyway!  I think history is so interesting, I have really enjoyed learning about the past, all the terrible and beautiful.  The most talked about seems to be terrible but that can be expected.   

I have decided to add a monthly history segment to my blog.  My goal is to talk about lesser-known times in history, I am not going to be writing about WWII with you, that would be silly.  

I am going to start with what happened on November 20, 1969.  Established in San Francisco was an organization called the Indians of All Tribes.  Their meeting place burned in 1969 so the group had to find a new place to meet.  Before we go any further I would like to give a bit of a back story to the state of things for Native Americans at the time.  It was not good, in the 1960s the Native Americans were the nation's highest poverty minority rate.  

On November 20th, 1969 the Indians of All Tribes Indians re-claimed the abandoned federal land of Alcatraz.  They made it their own by decorating the walls with spray paint.  The leaders occupied the warren and guard's old quarters.  And natives slept in the cells as it was warmer than just outside.   They said they didn't mind the situation, the lack of running water, toilets, electricity, etc.  They said it wasn't much different than what many Natives were getting on Native American Reservations and all over the world in their deep poverty.  

Kids would run around the island as the adults attended meetings and committees.  They occupied the island for 19 months.  In the last couple of weeks that they were there, there was a fire, and while no one really knew who set the fire the assumption, and a good assumption, was the government trying to get them out.  

The Natives had hopes of turning the island into an Indian university or cultural center.  It seems they failed.  But no, it just turned out differently than planned.  When they began the occupation of Alcatraz, plans to sell the island to private developers as some amusement park or other, were dropped and it turned into the national park that we know it to be today.  Adam Fortunate Eagle Nordwall, one of the original leaders of the occupation said, "It caused major changes in government policies toward Indians. So we won." 

 

I have been learning about a lot of Native American history recently and this is not fiction.  This is a true story and these pictures are real.  So are all the cruel stories of what the white settlers did to the natives in the past.  No matter how many years sit between now and then doesn't make it less real.  Read about it, it is more than cruel.  White settlers ripped Natives from their homes, families, customs, and lives.  0

 

Thank you for reading!  What do you think about the idea to have monthly history posts?  

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