Читать книгу Nine-tenths of the Law - Hannah Dobbz - Страница 8

“Territoriality is a way of organizing and talking about power. The problem is one of power, not space. There is plenty of the latter.”

—Milner S. Ball[1]

“A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life. Interpretations in law also constitute justifications for violence which has already occurred or which is about to occur.”

—Robert M. Cover[2]

When I was a kid, I thought that history was something that had already happened and was over; all the continents had already been discovered, and all the wars had already been fought. It took me years to understand that history is created all the time and that through history we are able to better understand the movements of today.

A history created all the time is an apt way to talk about the American Indian experience, an essential topic to a thorough discourse about land struggles in the United States. Of course, we have all been made aware since childhood that Europeans stole this continent from the indigenous peoples who had lived on it for tens of thousands of years prior. But even when our textbooks were not revisionist or downright racist, Native Americans were still portrayed as a sort of dinosaur—one of history’s great tragedies that anyone alive today could safely and passively lament because the colonizers and Indians of the past were long dead.

Patricia Nelson Limerick eloquently describes the situation in this way:

Since there was no chance of reversing the conquest, it was safe to regret it. Discontent with modern industrial society led to an interchanging of the usual terms: white Americans were the barbarians, savage and unprincipled, possessed by primitive greed; Indians were the genuinely civil people, who lived with an ecological wisdom and saintliness that made white Americans look like childish brutes.[3]

An exploration of American Indian history that goes deeper than a superficial understanding of their abuse is rare. And the story of their past is further obscured to the mainstream when Indians themselves tend to be notably absent from current events. Most of the things we know about Native Americans we learned in elementary school, and those things tended to be reductive stereotypes that we perceived as glaringly obsolete. Images of feathers, headdresses, and loin cloths were and continue to be so painfully primitive to young people trapped in an age of rapidly advancing technology. And all talk of native peoples was relegated to the history books, effectively removing them from the present tense as a people who continue to live and breathe and struggle.

Bruce N. Duthu calls this phenomenon the “dying race” thesis.[4] Europeans employed this thesis as a reaction to the presence of natives that stymied their original plans for colonization in the New World. The “dying race” thesis presupposed the extinction of hundreds of tribes by virtue of performative speech; if the notion were absorbed into the hearts and minds of the public, then it would eventually become true. Many of the historical Indian plights that followed can be traced back to and justified by the dying race thesis.

The tactic was particularly useful in disputes over land, the linchpin of indigenous struggles. Because American Indians tended to view land as a life-giving and life-sustaining force, while Europeans tended to view it as a resource, a commodity, and a source of revenue, the two perspectives on the value of land were irreconcilable.[5] This, of course, was not the only difference between the two groups: In a catch-22 for natives, settlers declared that only Christians could invoke the Doctrine of Discovery, the credo that granted colonizers land simply because they were the first Christians to discover it.[6] The declarations that vested power in Christians were the first of many ways in which colonizers dehumanized natives and habitually branded them as inferior. This narrative has stretched through time to touch even the contemporary struggles of Native Americans.

The first and most pivotal case regarding indigenous peoples in U.S. law was the 1823 case of Johnson v. McIntosh, a case that not coincidentally involved no input from indigenous peoples. Johnson argued that, before European colonization, Indian tribes “held the country in absolute sovereignty, as independent nations, both as to the right of jurisdiction and sovereignty, and the right of soil,” while McIntosh asserted that the tribes were in a “state of nature, and [had] never been admitted into the general society of nations.”[7]

The court favored McIntosh, forcing Indian tribes to relinquish their sovereignty, and endowing natives with a paternally granted “right to occupancy.” Ultimately, this ruling set a precedent, justifying all subsequent maneuvers to disenfranchise Native Americans and set them on an interminable course of federal abuse. According to Duthu, “The decision rationalized the dispossession of a continent from its original owners by creating a legal framework that, at its core, assumed the racial inferiority of Indian people.”[8]

The decision not only shaped indigenous affairs in the United States for the foreseeable future, but it also influenced the legal structure of natives’ place in commonwealth countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.[9] This racist ethos is explicitly carved into the language of the courts, illustrating that these attempts to bureaucratically extinguish whole tribes of people was not a subtle one and proved to be anything but unintentional.

In the 1913 case of United States v. Sandoval, a dispute over the selling of alcohol by non-Indians on Pueblo Indian land in New Mexico, the court condescended to call the Pueblos simple-minded and obtuse: “Always living in separate and isolated communities, adhering to primitive modes of life, largely influenced by superstition and [fetishism], and chiefly governed according to the crude customs inherited from their ancestors, [the Pueblos] are essentially a simple, uninformed and inferior people.”[10] Similarly, and as late as 1980, Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist said Native Americans “lived only for the day, recognized no rights of property, robbed or killed anyone if they thought they could get away with it, inflicted cruelty without a qualm, and endured torture without flinching.”[11]

The Johnson case, however, was just the first in a series that would incrementally decimate indigenous peoples’ land base on the continent, often pushing them to other open lands, and eventually relocating them to cities. Seven years after Johnson, in 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which would authorize the government to exchange lands west of the Mississippi River for eastern tribal lands. Some forty years after that, as the American conservation movement was taking its first steps, and National Parks were becoming fashionable displays of environmental integrity, the U.S. government lassoed larger tracts of land further west and again wrangled them away from natives. The Crow, the Blackfoot, the Nez Perce, the Shoshone, and the Bannock Indians’ insistence on hunting within the bounds of Yellowstone National Park baffled park authorities, who saw the natives as interfering with pristine wilderness. One government liaison to the Shoshone wrote in 1865, “Wild Indians, like wild horses, must be corralled upon reservations. There they can be brought to work, and soon will become a self-supporting people, earning their own living by their industry, instead of trying to pick up a bare subsistence by the chase.”[12]

The presence of these natives challenged the Western European assumption of dichotomous spheres of activity: During the week, white men worked and lived in the cities; on the weekends, they came to the wilderness to relax, commune with nature, and hunt for sport. The Indians of Yellowstone lived outside of those spheres, which is why they were eventually walled into various reservations in the area. That kept the West categorical, and it kept the National Parks comfortable only for weekend warriors.[13]

With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, as white settlers migrated further west, the beast of land consumption grew. The same year that the Indian Removal Act was signed into law, Congress also passed the first Preemption Act, which entitled any non-Indian settler on unsurveyed public domain to claim up to 160 acres and buy it from the government for $1.25 per acre. The act was originally intended to expire after two years, but was renewed in 1832, 1834, 1838, and 1840. In 1841, Congress extended the act indefinitely. It was finally repealed as late as 1891, during what became known as the Allotment Era for Native Americans, ­between the 1870s and 1930s.

The General Allotment Act (or Dawes Act) of 1887 authorized the parceling of reservation lands for individual sale. Individual Indians could claim parcels, but the surplus would be opened to homesteading by non-Indians.[14] “Congress dreamed up the Dawes Act…to destroy the Indian nations, then take the rest of their land,” writes Russell Means of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in his autobiography. “One must understand that to an Indian, ownership is a foreign concept. The earth is our Grandmother, who provides us with everything we need to survive. How can you own your grandmother? How can you sell her? How does a piece of paper that you probably can’t read prove ownership of something that can’t be owned?”[15]

The clash of traditional economies and the new American economy marks a definitive ideological shift in North American history. In the new American economy, all aspects of the environment were segmented and assigned various worths in terms of dollars, thus transmogrifying land into property, and laying the foundation for today’s U.S. real-estate market system. As Means describes above, the indigenous were surprised by this notion of private property: The primary economic institutions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, for example, were longhouses in which all the tribe’s goods were stockpiled and doled out by women’s councils.[16] Collective ownership models defeated the idea of owning altogether, as value was based on use, and use was based on need. Since these practices applied similarly to land use, the implementation of Anglo-European ideas about private property were disruptive and disorienting to tribes, making the Allotment Era one of the most destructive periods economically, as well as culturally, for Indians. By permitting natives to maintain their land only in the form of an individual parcel, the U.S. government isolated Indians from their extended families and communities, while simultaneously dismantling the tribes’ custom of land sharing.

White custom, which had migrated to North America, now rapidly proliferated its individualist paradigms. By implementing arbitrary legal statutes, the U.S. government succeeded in compartmentalizing nearly every aspect of American life. By way of the Dawes Act, what was known as “Indian Country” was actually an acreage of land that, while often populated by some Indians, ironically also contained parcels owned in fee simple by non-Indians.[a] Some white men even extended their land holdings by marrying impoverished and often illiterate Indian women, then forcing them to work their own land.[17]

The indigenous land base was further torn apart along lines perforated by surveyors when Indians were forced to buy the plots they already lived on. Any Indian who resisted this movement toward cultural isolation and Anglo-Americanization was branded as an “irreconcilable” and subject to arrest, incarceration, or forced appointment of land.[18] According to Duthu, “The allotment policy was the key plank in the government’s assimilation efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries designed to bring an end to the distinct cultural and political existence of Indian tribes.”[19]

Divesting natives of their right to determine who lived on their land further deprived them of their agency to define the character of the place where they lived—which still further smothered their cultural birthright. When Congress ended the allotment system in 1934, Indian land had dwindled to about 48 million acres, down from 138 million acres in 1887. At the end of the Allotment Era, Native Americans had the right of ­occupation on less than .02 percent of the land in the United States.[20]

In 1955, the Supreme Court heard the case of Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States, in which the Tee-Hit-Ton Indians sought compensation for lumber taken from their lands. The resolution of the Johnson case from 123 years earlier figured heavily into the deliberation in Tee-Hit-Ton. This case was significant because it was the first time that the court distinguished Indian title from “recognized” title and, in Duthu’s words,

concluded that since the former was not “property” under the Constitution, Congress could extinguish the Indian title without making just compensation to the tribes. This holding effectively created a different class of property rights for certain Indian land claims to avoid triggering the legal obligation imposed on government by the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which states, in pertinent part: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”[21]

Here, Duthu is referring to eminent domain—the government’s prerogative to seize privately owned land in exchange for just compensation. But because the Supreme Court in 1823 deemed Indian peoples non-nations and earmarked their lands as non-property, it was ambiguous whether Congress should act under its eminent domain powers or under its trustee powers. If eminent domain was not applicable due to the status of Indian land, then just compensation need not be made.[22]

The Tee-Hit-Ton decision came about during the so-called Termination Era of the 1950s and ’60s. The Termination Era—just as it sounds—was a time during which the government committed to terminating Native Americans as a distinct people.[b] The cornerstone of this era was the highly destructive Urban Relocation Program. The program strategically moved indigenous individuals to selected urban centers around the country (including, but not limited to, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, Phoenix, and San Francisco), getting them off reservations and assimilating them into mainstream culture. As a result of this unanimous “House Concurrent Resolution 108” in August 1953, approximately 109 tribes were eliminated and 1,262,155 acres of land were affected.[23]

The stated goal of the Relocation Program was to provide an escape for Indians from the extreme poverty of life on the reservation,[c] but it was a gambit on the part of the government, who stood to gain additional ­federal land from natives, as well as the bonus of Indian assimilation.

Having been transplanted from the lives they knew to the hustle and bustle of the city, many indigenous people found the urban environment disorienting. For the first time in their lives, they had to budget money and practice fiscal responsibility—foreign concepts to members of tribes that shared nearly everything. And general planning for the future seemed wasteful to peoples accustomed to living in the present.[24] Their accommodations in the poorest parts of town and their jobs often unskilled labor (if they found work at all), these relocated natives entered into a poverty cycle that precluded them from ever moving ahead ­economically—despite the stated mission of the program.

Socially, Indians were subjected to racist attacks from people in every sector of society, from police officers to school teachers. In schools, young Indians were barred from speaking their traditional languages, from wearing their traditional clothes or hairstyles, and from practicing their traditional religions. On the streets, police harassed, beat, and arrested natives systematically.[25] Many whites, having never seen indigenous people before, acted in xenophobic outbursts, exemplified in U.S. Army captain Richard H. Pratt’s statement that “the only good Indian is a dead one…. All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”[26]

This degradation of community reinforced assimilation and the abandonment of natives’ cultural identities. According to Troy R. Johnson, “Cultural destruction and alienation were inevitable. With their familiar culture lost to them, Indians thus found themselves caught between two conflicting impulses: the economic necessity that caused them to leave the reservation and the cultural and emotional ties that made them want to return to the reservation.”[27]

The Urban Relocation Program persisted into the late ’60s, but it should not be understood that indigenous peoples showed no resistance to their cultural genocide during that time. Perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most notable, instance of native resistance came in the form of the Alcatraz occupation. Fed up with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA),[d] a group of San Francisco Indians unknowingly started a movement with their Alcatraz takeover, one that inspired a domino chain of demonstrations by indigenous people across the country.

Following the fire that destroyed the San Francisco American Indian Center on October 28, 1969, a group of fourteen Indian youths—mostly college students—decided to occupy the abandoned Alcatraz Island as a gesture of self-determination. The U.S. government had closed the island’s prison facility in 1963, hoisting the responsibility of its maintenance onto the General Services Administration (GSA) at a cost of $100,000 annually. The island sat abandoned but guarded by lonely caretakers until this group of natives (who came to call themselves the Indians of All Tribes[e]) recalled an action that had ­happened five years earlier:

On March 19, 1964, a small group of Sioux men “invaded” and “claimed” the island in accordance with an 1868 Sioux treaty,[f] which entitled the tribe to any surplus government land. They declared:

Under the U.S. Code we as Sioux Indians are settling on Federal land no longer appropriated. Because we are civilized human beings, and we realize that these acts give us land at no cost we are willing to pay the highest price for California land set by the Government—47 cents per acre. It is our intention to continue to allow the U.S. Government to operate the lighthouse, providing it does not interfere with our settlement.[28]

The 1964 group only stayed on the island for a matter of hours, dancing in the shadow of the lighthouse and running around “laying claim to various parts of the island, just as the many whites who had come to our land had claimed our rivers, forests, hills, and meadows. For a few exhilarating hours,” wrote Russell Means, “I felt a freedom that I had never experienced, as though Alcatraz were mine.”[29]

When U.S. marshals arrived, the occupiers went home to file paperwork with the Bureau of Land Claims in Sacramento. Indeed, this was meant less as a media ploy (albeit partially) and more as a serious attempt to bureaucratically acquire title. “This is no uprising or any such wild plot. We’re entitled to the land free under the law,” said Richard McKenzie, one of the occupiers. “We feel the rights given to the American Indian should and can be exercised.”[30]

U.S. Attorney Cecil Poole stated that no charges would be brought upon the group, as they hadn’t done any damage to the property during the “invasion.” He then jokingly said that if the government wanted to punish the five men, it “might actually make them stay” on the island, which was isolated, windswept, and chilly.[31]

In 1965, when the U.S. government began holding public hearings on how Alcatraz should be developed, McKenzie filed an injunction against the sale of Alcatraz. He argued that he should receive title to the property as well as a judgment of $2,500,000 or the assessed value of the island. An answer was filed in February 1966, and the injunction proved unsuccessful. On May 15, 1968, Attorney General Ramsey Clark informed Senator Edward V. Long that the Department of Justice had “concluded that there is not any legal basis for the claims of the American Indian Foundation or similar groups to Alcatraz.”[32] Three weeks later, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California threw out McKenzie’s case for “lack of prosecution.” The federal government asserted that the occupation had been nothing more than a sophomoric publicity stunt and therefore carried no legal weight.[33]

Inspired by the stunt, in 1969, as indigenous rage over the dispossession of land and heritage was reaching a boiling point, a militant Mohawk named Richard Oakes burst onto the American Indian activist scene. In the following years he would participate in dozens of occupations, and he became a household name during the two-year-long Alcatraz takeover.

Only three months after the Summer of Love, on November 9, 1969, Oakes and forty other Bay Area Indians took the island in the name of the Indians of All Tribes and claimed it under the Doctrine of Discovery. And this time, they promised, they wouldn’t leave so easily. Richard Oakes and Adam Nordwall were frequently pegged as the “leaders” of the occupation because they were often the most visible to the media, but both maintain that the movement had no official leader.[34] Collectively, the Indians of All Tribes released this derisive tongue-in-cheek statement, chiding white colonizers for their treatment of natives both past and present:

To the Great White Father and All His People:

We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty: We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for 24 dollars ($24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white mans’ purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for these sixteen acres is more than was paid when Manhattan Island was sold, but we offer that land values have risen over the years. Our offer of $1.24 per acre is greater than the 47 cents per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land. We will give to the inhabitants of this land a portion of that land for their own, to be held in trust by the American Indian Government—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea—to be administered by the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs (BCA). We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the white men.[35]

The group was removed from the island twice, and on November 20 they went back a third time, this time with a group of eighty-nine Indians. Most were college students, but the cluster also included half a dozen children between the ages of two and six, and a few married couples. The Coast Guard was alerted to this invasion attempt and prevented the boat from docking—but Oakes and some others jumped overboard and swam to shore. Upon arriving, they informed Glenn Dodson, the spooked and frenzied caretaker, that if he cooperated, the Indians would create a Bureau of Caucasian Affairs and appoint him the head of it. Dodson agreed, noting that he was one-eighth Indian himself.[36]

When the island’s chief security officer, John Hart, who had been away on vacation, returned to Alcatraz, he appeared amicable to the Indians’ presence as well. “As long as you’re here, you might as well be comfortable,” he said, and directed the Indians to the buildings with working plumbing, alerting them to some of the hazards of the deteriorating landscape. With that, the Indians made themselves at home on the island, preparing for what would be a two-year stay, though they didn’t know it at the time. They painted giant “no trespassing” signs, including one that read “You Are Now on Indian Land” and another that read “Warning Keep Off Indian Property” (an alteration from the original sign, which had read “Warning Keep Off U.S. Property”).[37]

The Indians of All Tribes’ reasoning for the long-term takeover seemed sound: “How are we to be charged with trespassing on the white man’s land when the white man has taken all of this land from us?” they asked.[38] “If a one-day occupation by white men on Indian land years ago established squatter’s right, then the one-day occupation of Alcatraz should establish Indian rights to the island.”[39]

The U.S. government’s response to the occupation was cautious. Though the event had quickly exploded into a national domestic crisis, officials wanted to be sure that they handled the situation prudently. In light of some recent public-relations disasters, such as the My Lai and Kent State Massacres, the government did not want to react violently to the occupation and risk further blood on their hands. Instead, they employed a Coast Guard blockade. If occupiers were unable to receive shipments of food and supplies, then eventually the government would have starved them out. But officials underestimated the tenacity, the militancy, and the overall cunning of the occupying force.

Supporters would trick the Coast Guard by sailing alongside other boats in the bay and then surreptitiously toss provisions onto the Alcatraz barge, which was docked on the island. When this happened, the Coast Guard would blare its sirens and chase the boat away. While they were pursuing the first boat, a second boat would slide up to the barge and unload supplies. Occupiers also dealt with the blockade by creating diversions such as starting fires or throwing firebombs along one shore of the island while a canoer slipped up onto the other side to unload food donations from people on the mainland.[40]

Eventually realizing that the blockade was ineffective—and potentially counter-productive, as it appeared to call more attention and favorable publicity to the occupation—the government lifted the blockade on November 24. The government’s new plan was to wait until it could negotiate a compromise with the Indians of All Tribes or until the Indians left on their own. They hoped for the latter.

Five months into the occupation, the government was engaged in constant, sweaty-browed negotiations with the occupiers, who were enjoying an increasingly favorable public opinion. And there was no shortage of publicity. News of the Alcatraz occupation stretched across the country and around the world. The Indians had supporters as far away as Canada, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, and Japan. They received hundreds of letters of support and inquiries about how to help.

A telegram from Japan read, “Stay with it getting world wide recognition.”[41] In broken English, Monique Schoop of Zurich, Switzerland, wrote an impassioned letter that, though muddled, did not lack conviction: “At the moment, we have a lot of difficulties with the justice because of the former demonstrations, etc., but I think that nevertheless we finally shall win. We have to fight with their own [arms? ILLEGIBLE]—with the law, not against it, against the citizen and the government! Hang them with their own laws!!”[42]

The occupiers even received a letter from a sixteen-year-old girl in Indiana offering to do whatever she could to help, claiming that there is “clearly no such thing as justice.” Most notable though is a letter from an eleven-year-old Finnish boy named Petri Rajama who tells the Indians that his mother is helping him write the letter in English. It read, in part, “I would be very happy if I would get a letter from an Indian boy telling me about life on the island.... It would be nice to know are you living in a wigwam?” The letter was accompanied by an eerie black-and-white photograph of a stern-looking pale blond boy slumped in a chair, wearing a jean jacket and an Indian headband with a single feather poking out the top. His look is severe, as if, despite his age, he maintains a comprehensive understanding of all the world’s oppressive circumstances. His eyes gaze intensely at the camera as if to tell the Indians, “I understand your plight, and I am in solidarity with you.”[g]

Remarkably, all of these correspondences arrived in the hands of the Indians despite such lazy and incomplete mailing addresses such as “To the Indians of the Island Alcatraz, Western U.S.A.” and “The Indians, Alcatraz, SF, CA.” The occupation had gained such notoriety that even the postal service knew how to readdress and deliver their mail. In this light, the Alcatraz occupation could be considered one of the most famous, massive, and overall effective squatting efforts of modern times. Not only did the Indians capture the attention of the Nixon Administration, but they also had leverage in their negotiations—one factor that allowed the group to maintain their space on the island for nearly two years.

After five months on Alcatraz, the government offered to turn the island into a federal park with an emphasis on Indian culture, if the Indians would end the occupation. There was no deadline for a response to the offer, and the squatters would not be removed if they said no. So the Indians refused the offer, stating, “We will no longer be museum pieces, tourist attractions, and politicians’ playthings…[and we do] not need statues to our dead because our dead never die.”[43]

The government was getting frustrated. The Indians of All Tribes were receiving so much publicity and so much public support that a removal or intervention of any kind would bring to bear a domestic crisis. Even the Hell’s Angels offered their “assistance” in the event of a government raid on the island. Further, according to island caretaker Don W. Carroll, there were now thirty-five pistols, rifles, and shotguns in a makeshift arsenal on the island. Shortly after receiving this report, the GSA removed Carroll and the two other caretakers from Alcatraz because of safety concerns. The GSA claimed that it would make no attempt to evict the Indians because “their demonstration has been peaceful and has not disrupted normal government operations.”[44]

But the government was quietly concerned about the Indians’ use of narcotics and the numerous firearms on the island. Having removed the caretakers, government agents realized another strategy to expedite the Indians leaving on their own: They cut the island’s supply of water, as well as its phone and electricity, leaving the group as castaways on a rock without standard means of survival. It was the authorities’ hope that Alcatraz would, in this instance, again become the prison that it once had been.

In response, hundreds more Indians made their way to the Rock for a powwow and to set fire to many of Alcatraz’s historic buildings “in defiance of a country that had turned its back on their proposal.”[45] They also burned the dock to prevent the Coast Guard from landing and silencing their protest. The San Francisco Examiner wrote of the incident, that it “might be called the battle of the redskins versus the red faces; the pale faces are becoming red with embarrassment.”[46]

After this stunt, the government chose to simply leave the Indians alone, hoping that the difficulty of life on the island without amenities would force them to surrender. But the Indians had quite a bit of support in their occupation—financial as well as moral. According to Johnson, it is impossible to know exactly how much money was donated to the cause because of poor record keeping, but estimates range from $20–25 million. Donors included musicians with names as big as Malvina Reynolds, Creedance Clearwater Revival, and the Grateful Dead.

Needless to say, the Indians were fiscally free to do as they pleased on the island, as all of their basic needs were taken care of by donations. One component of life on Alcatraz included establishing schools and health clinics for the island’s residents, but the other component included a spectacular and involved show of force in island security and defense—the “Bureau of Caucasian Affairs.”

The Indians engaged in small-scale warfare by tossing Molotov cocktails at the Coast Guard boats and shooting arrows and stones at passing ferries in response to passengers’ obscene gestures and remarks. The ferries often then neglected the 200-yard perimeter request and slammed the Indians’ boat against the pilings. The Indians also dotted the former prison’s recreation yard with over thirty garbage cans stuffed with ­gasoline-soaked rags to be lit in the event of a helicopter invasion.

Such an invasion did arrive on June 13, 1971—nineteen months after the occupation began. Public opinion of the occupation had waned as a result of the Indians’ flagrant disregard for government authority, as well as the unrelated collision of two Chevron oil tankers in the bay, which dramatized the need for serious government stewardship of nearby waters. Further, internal dynamics on Alcatraz had soured, and the infighting was a disappointment to supporters, who then abandoned the cause. Without public protection, the fifteen remaining Alcatraz residents no longer enjoyed a public-relations shield around their island. And with elections coming in November, no politician wanted the pesky “symbol” of the Alcatraz occupation muddying up power campaigns—and so the government used this window of time to finally stage the eviction.

While the government appeared patient to wait nearly two years to move on Alcatraz, they were all the while bitterly stewing and growing increasingly agitated by the Indians’ antics. Robert Robertson, one of the government negotiators, claimed (reminiscent of statements historically made about Indians) that “reason is a commodity [the occupiers] want nothing to do with—they are emotionally charged, naïve and not used to responsibility. All they want is the island and an unending flow of money to do what they want, whether what they want has any chance of success or not. Their attorneys are good only for throwing fuel on the fire of unreasonableness.”[47]

The GSA was of the mind that if the Indians wanted to stake a claim on the island, they might do so only through the standard channels of legislation. Within that system, any Indian claim would be mired in legislative bureaucracy and eventually fizzle. The Alcatraz occupation was a physical manifestation of indigenous power and played outside of the established rules for challenging title in the United States; this legitimately frightened authorities. In July 1970, President Nixon actually made a speech repudiating the government’s past treatment of Indians and pushing for “self-determination over termination.”[48] As a gesture of good faith toward Native peoples, he returned the Taos Blue Lake, in New Mexico, to the Taos Indians who had been fighting for the lake’s return since the U.S. government seized it in 1906.[h]

The Indians’ visceral threat to government agencies and to the U.S. understanding of property was met by Janus-faced authorities: One response was to act sympathetic, as Nixon did in 1970, and to ride the coattails of pro-indigenous movements in order to maintain popularity in the polls; the second response was to aggressively and semi-­surreptitiously attack the threat using force, as agents did in 1971, sending a message of intolerance toward ideas of proprietary dissent.

Three hours after the White House gave the green light, three Coast Guard vessels, one helicopter, and twenty to thirty armed U.S. marshals cleared the island of people in less than thirty minutes. They took six men, four women, and five children into custody. The media were not notified nor allowed on site.

Vicki Lee, a thirty-year-old Shoshone Indian from San Diego, said to the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, “My little girl said they held a gun to her chest and she asked, ‘Are they going to kill me?’ and my son hid under the bed but came out when they put a gun to his head. I don’t think my husband should carry arms for the U.S. [in Vietnam] when his children are at gunpoint at home.” She finished by declaring, “We will return to Alcatraz. If not Alcatraz, someplace else. We are prepared to die.”[49]

Although the Indians of All Tribes were eventually strong-armed by the U.S. government, Vicki Lee was right: The movement’s fuse had been lit, and demonstrations and occupations were exploding all over the country in what became known as the Self-Determination Era. In 1970 alone, inspired by the actions on Alcatraz Island, Indian groups staged invasions, occupations, or general protests at Fort Lawton, Washington; Fort Lewis, Washington; the BIA office in Denver; Ellis Island; the BIA office in Alameda; Pyramid Lake, Nevada; Rattlesnake Island, California; Middletown, California; Stanly Island, New York; Belmont Harbor, Illinois; Lassen National Forest, California; Hiawatha National Forest, Michigan; Tacoma, Washington; Mount Rushmore; Burney, California; Badlands National Monument, South Dakota; Davis, California; Santa Rosa, California; Healdsburg, California; Wohler Bridge, California; Plymouth, Massachusetts; and the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.

Some actions were as creative as Richard Oakes’s unsanctioned toll collection on through-roads of a Pomo Indian reservation in California. Rifle in hand, he stopped motorists and charged them a dollar for passing through Indian land. Oakes was arrested and initially charged with armed robbery but eventually let go on the promise that he would cease his toll collections.[50]

In the years following the Alcatraz occupation, dozens of similar demonstrations persisted. The trend of militant indigenous actions in the 1960s and ’70s was not the product of innately savage minds, as many government figures from colonial to recent times have asserted. It was the result of centuries of trauma induced by an abusive paternal government who gave Native peoples few options but resistance. Walter Prescott Webb wrote in The Great Plains that “when men suffer, they become politically radical; when they cease to suffer, they favor the existing order.” This truth extends not only to the sordid history of Native Americans, but also to white settlers who were later subject to similarly discriminatory understandings of property.

The Indians of All Tribes claimed their land by right of discovery—by virtue of having been there first—but the U.S. government claimed their portion of North America by “title by genocide.”[51] Property law was a nasty game, and until Indians could play dirty on the level with colonizers they would never retrieve the land they had lost during the primary years of imperialism.

That said, in 1983, the Connecticut Pequot tribe legally and bureaucratically re-annexed an acreage of their original land base in accordance with the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act. Local whites were furious. Then-Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman called the move “welfare for the rich,” as three years later the Pequots would go on to own the lucrative Foxwoods Casino in southeast Connecticut. Steve Kemper complained in Yankee Magazine, “Tribes like the Pequots have reached the point where land annexation is not about preserving a culture or achieving self-sufficiency. It is about expansion of an already successful business in a way that harms their neighbors.”[52]

Whether or not this is an accurate assessment, white policy makers in the third richest state in the country still found reason to feel victimized by the Pequot tribe. After all, if Indians weren’t a people of the past to pity for their poverty, then they were legitimate competition for capital. As Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. wrote in The White Man’s Indian,

Since Whites primarily understood the Indian as an antithesis to themselves, then civilization and Indianness as they defined them would forever be opposites. Only civilization had history and dynamics in this view, so therefore Indianness must be conceived of as ahistorical and static. If the Indian changed through the adoption of civilization as defined by Whites, then he was no longer truly Indian according to the image, because the Indian was judged by what Whites were not. Change toward what Whites were made him ipso facto less Indian.[53]

By this definition of “Indian,” the affluent Pequots of Connecticut were nothing of the sort. Suddenly everyone else in the state was the loser, impoverished at the hands of a gang of merciless Indian socialites. Duthu describes this event as challenging “one of America’s most enduring mythologies—the myth of the ‘vanishing Indian.’”[54] And what might challenge that mythology more: the idea that the Indians were not completely exterminated when that sort of thing was more globally acceptable, or the idea that they had learned property law? According to Duthu, the land claim lawsuit of the Pequots exemplifies a surge of similar claims that have re-established and sometimes enhanced the dimensions of ancestral homelands. Utilizing federal laws from the 1930s Indian Reorganization Era, tribes continue to win back the land that was stolen from them centuries ago.

In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians in 1980, the tribe won a money judgment that has accrued over $500 million, but that remains untouched in the U.S. Treasury because the Sioux maintain that the lawsuit was never about money—they wanted their ancestral lands back.[55]

The U.S. government was not prepared for the indigenous resurgence demonstrated in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Supreme Court admitted in a court opinion of South Dakota v. Yankton Sioux Tribe in 1998 that

within a generation or two, it was thought, the tribes would dissolve, their reservations would disappear, and individual Indians would be absorbed into the larger community of white settlers. With respect to the Yankton Reservation in particular, some Members of Congress speculated that “close contact with the frugal, moral, and industrious people who will settle [on the reservation would] stimulate individual effort and make [the tribe’s] progress much more rapid than heretofore.”[56]

In the late-nineteenth century, when, in spite of the law, the indigenous peoples of Yellowstone continued to hunt for food within the park’s bounds, they were vilified as an “unmitigated evil.” But later, as white poachers moved into the park and began illicit hunting practices, suddenly the clean, bold line between whites and Indians was blurred. If the Indians were the ones with no respect for the law, then what was a white man of similar lawlessness? Thus, locals created two categories of Indian: red Indians and white Indians. This usage suggests that “the privilege of whiteness could depend on one’s environmental practices.”

Similarly, today, if a proficient level of legal manipulation makes a white man a white man, then what do you call an Indian property lawyer? As Duthu writes, “Only the restorative legal magic of one legal fiction—the federal ‘lands into trust’ process—can counter the destructive magic of another legal fiction, the loss of tribal lands through ‘discovery.’”[57]

Captain Richard H. Pratt wanted to kill the Indian to save the man. What he didn’t anticipate was that the man who would emerge might understand the legal fiction of American property laws better than the Indian who came before him.

a. Fee simple: A permanent and absolute tenure of an estate in land, with ­freedom to dispose of it at will.

b. According to the official line, “termination” referred to extinguishing the formal relationship between the U.S. government and Native American tribes. The subtext here, however, is that they would arrive at a terminated relationship by first terminating the distinct people—a process known as assimilation.

c. A poverty inflicted by the introduction of capitalism to non-capitalist societies.

d. Johnson writes, “According to Native Americans, the failure of the BIA to recognize their independence tended to generate feelings of paternalism and dependency, which damaged Indian culture and its strengths. The BIA asserted, however, that the Indians wanted the support and aid offered by the BIA, but resented needing it” (p. 23).

e. As tribal distinctions diminished during the Termination years, some Indians found it more useful to ally themselves with similarly oppressed people from other tribes and act ecumenically to fight poverty, racism, and cultural genocide.

f. The Sioux Treaty of 1868 was the end product of the Red Cloud War—a war caused by the United States’s illegal use of Indian reservations for military forts and their granting rights of way to railroads through Sioux-held land. On March 27, 1964, McKenzie and the four others (Garfield Spotted Elk, Walter Means, Mark Martinez, and Allen Cottier) filed a claim for Alcatraz with the interior secretary, citing U.S. Code 474, 334, and the Fort Laramie Treaty, ­specifically Article VI, Paragraph 6.

g. Upon discovering this photograph in the San Francisco Public Library archives, I was awestruck. I wanted to copy it and take it home, but the library wouldn’t allow me. The photo carried with it such an intense meaning, and one that is rarely shipped by way of the postal service today: I cannot imagine any eleven year old—particularly one across the world—being so motivated as to hand-write a letter to a group of strangers, professing his support for their radical movement. I can scarcely imagine an adult doing this when most activist campaigns are now spotlighted on and swell in support using the Internet. Further, the Web is so saturated with campaigns that it is difficult to single out any one movement to feel passionate about or act passionately for. When my eyes scanned one handwritten letter of support that read, “I really do care,” I seized up, struck by the sincerity in the writer’s voice. Then I took a moment to lament that I will likely never see such a genuine letter again. October 23, 1970. San Francisco History Center, Alcatraz Collection. SFH 11. Box 1, Folder 10.

h. The return of Blue Lake to the Taos Indians was not simply an act of authoritative benevolence by the Nixon Administration; the Taos had been engrossed in a legal battle over the site for sixty-four years that was nearing an end. Further, to punctuate the lawsuit, in October 1970, two Forest Service signs in Carson National Forest were blown up by plastic explosives, and a second bombing occurred two days later in protest of a proposed “ranger bill” for Taos Blue Lake. The bill was defeated, and the Taos gained control of the lake once more.