It was supposed to be a “symbolic” takeover of Alcatraz Island for the TV cameras. But Richard Oakes was done talking. When the flotilla of Natives and media got near the abandoned prison island, he said, “Come on. Let’s go. Let’s get it on!” He jumped into San Francisco Bay.
“I felt I had to do it, so I just jumped off. I didn’t have time to be scared,” he later wrote in Ramparts magazine. He swam against the tide, scrambled onto some rocks, and was joined by four others who also swam to the island.
“We claimed the island by right of discovery. We represented five different tribes, so we claimed it in the name of the Indians of all the tribes, not just one tribe. That was the first time we used the name, which would become our name on the island; ‘Indians of All Tribes.’”
Authorities ushered the five off the island, but they returned with eighty men and women less than two weeks later. They took the island and held it for 19 months, from November 1969 to June 1971.
Why Alcatraz, a barren rock crowned by bleak concrete hulks? “The place was desolate,” Oakes recalled. “It was so run down that it was already beginning to feel like a reservation.” And that was the point: “All the white man does is spread concrete over the land. There are no vibrations; there’s no breath. Nothing can come from our Mother. She has been smothered.”
Many tribal traditions foretell a day when Indigenous people rise up and repair the damage caused by invading colonizers. Alcatraz drew people ready to make that day happen. And while that day still has not come, the occupation sparked tribal unity and pricked the conscience of the non-Indigenous public.
“For some, it was the first time that they had met with the people of other tribes, the first time they felt a unity with all Indians,” Oakes wrote. “The getting together of all Indians was something undreamed of since the Ghost Dance of 1889.”
The 1889 spread of the Ghost Dance ritual ended badly, with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In 1969, though, there were television cameras. Network news, talk show hosts, and movie stars paid visits during the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island. Busting heads was not an option.
That would come later.
Oakes was the scion of the legendary Haudenosaunee Confederacy, coming of age at a time when America was awakening to its flaws.
He experienced the indignity of foreign occupation each time his family submitted to customs inspections just to cross from the U.S. side of the Akwesasne Reservation to the Canadian side. Public schools “wanted me … to become a part of the machinery, to make me into what they wanted: a white Indian.”
At 16, he joined the generations of Mohawk men who were “skywalkers,” the daring iron workers who built the continent’s skyscrapers and bridges. But the hardhat-and-lunchbox life was not for him. He took night college courses, and in 1968 he chucked it all to drive across the country, checking out reservation life along the way.
The country was suffering the consequences of its policy of termination and relocation. Congress sought to wash its hands of the reservations and “mainstream” Natives into white culture. But the people lured into the cities were cast adrift in a society they didn’t understand or believe in. Those remaining on the reservation were afterthoughts when dams were built, pipelines dug, recreation areas mapped, and pollution permits issued.
The threats Oakes saw to his people and to their land were many and widespread. Rather than fight each separately, he envisioned a unified approach. Ending his travels in San Francisco, he joined the Bay Area’s activist Indian community and was in the first cohort in the San Francisco State College’s Native Studies program. He was named coordinator of the program and hosted leaders of the emerging Indigenous rights movement.
Among them were members of the White Roots of Peace movement from his own nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Six Indigenous nations of the Northeast have coexisted under a compact established at least 500 years ago. The Confederacy is the oldest living participatory democracy in the world, with a system of governance (with women choosing the chiefs), law, and resource management. Oakes found a model for his cause.
He spoke of bringing all tribes together under a Confederacy of All Indian Nations. Symbolically, Alcatraz was a good place to start. But as the months of occupation wore on, the nation’s attention wandered. And life on the island was hard. Oakes and his family left after their oldest daughter died in a fall down a stairwell.
“Alcatraz is not an island, it’s an idea,” he proclaimed in a speech to supporters in San Francisco. “It’s in the hearts and minds of every Indian, whether they [be] young, old, or middle-aged. It’s the promise of tomorrow, so that the Indians can have something. It’s a betterment for the Indian people today. The idea of Alcatraz is the acquisition of land, and to better the lot of American Indians everyplace.”
He joined the occupations of the abandoned Fort Lawton military base in Seattle, and of an executive retreat center and an island slated for resort development in Northern California. He supported fishing rights in Washington and the takeover of Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Colorado and California. He was known to stop cars entering forest lands to collect tolls.
Pacific Gas & Electric had a devil of a time with the Pit River Nation because it owned land that an Indian claims commission ruled belonged to the Pit Rivers. The company didn’t dare press trespass charges against protesters because that would force a court showdown on who was trespassing on whose land.
Nonviolent direct action did what it was intended to do: Get attention and clog jails and courts. It also built resentment among law enforcement.
When Pit Rivers occupied PG&E land near Burney, California, in October 1970, sheriff deputies, forest rangers, and federal agents responded in force. The Redding Record Searchlight reported: “Mace filled the crisp air. Women with tears rolling down their cheeks from Mace and anger cursed the officers as Indians were beaten to the ground and dragged to waiting squad cars. Gordon Montgomery, an elderly and crippled Pit River Indian, was clubbed into semi-consciousness. . . . Women had to push their way past officers to minister to his head wounds.”
Oakes’ friends and family urged him to take a lower profile. He suffered double vision and headaches after taking a pool cue to the head in a bar fight. He moved to the Pomo reserve in Northern California, writing a book and starting a greenhouse farm. And with a whimper, the occupation of Alcatraz ended in June 1971 when federal agents rousted the 15 remaining occupiers.
On Sept. 14, 1972, Oakes got into an argument with Michael Morgan, manager of a YMCA camp near the Pomo reserve. Morgan fired a rifle over Oakes’ head. Four witnesses heard the responding sheriff’s deputy ask Morgan: “Why did you shoot over his head? Why didn’t you shoot him? I have an M16 in the car that eats up Indians.” Morgan was later heard to say, “It was open season on coons, foxes, and Indians.”
Morgan accosted two men visiting Oakes a few days later, once again firing a rifle over their heads. When Oakes and Morgan crossed paths on September 20, on a road near the YMCA camp, Morgan was armed with a 9 mm handgun. He said he fired when Oakes lunged at him. The bullet pierced Oakes’ heart, and he died instantly. He was 30 years old.
At the time of his death, the occupation of the abandoned Fort Lawton Army base near Seattle had ended in a small victory. A portion of the base was given over for an Indigenous cultural center, and the Daybreak Star Center remains today as the headquarters of the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.
Days after Oakes’ death, leaders of Indigenous rights organizations met at the Albany Hotel in Denver to plan a caravan to Washigton. The Trail of Broken Treaties protest called for the United States to honor its treaties and create a process of reparation for stolen land.
Before the ’70s were out, the United States officially scrapped its policy of termination and passed laws and policies to address poverty, unemployment, and persecution.
But the Pit River, Lakota, Muscogee, and dozens of other nations still await the return of their stolen lands.
Six months after Oakes’ death, an all-white jury in Santa Rosa, California, acquitted Michael Morgan of manslaughter. Four jurors “felt he was guilty but the law said he was innocent,” one holdout juror said. “Someone said, ‘We’ll never get a conviction; either hang it up or acquit him.’ So we did.”
SOURCES
Born and raised in Denver, I feel guilty for living on stolen land. I cheered on the occupation of Alcatraz back in the day, but had no recollection of Richard Oakes until reading A Journey to Freedom, a detailed biography by Kent Blansett. I wonder what impact Oakes would have had if he had lived past 30. His character avoids murder in my upcoming novel, Mission: Butterfly.
I discovered the fascinating history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the process of this research. The history and the legend of Deganawidah are well told in The White Roots of Peace by Paul A.W. Wallace (I bought a used copy through an independent dealer; this link takes you to its place on the Internet Archive).
Oakes’ account of the Alcatraz occupation was published after his death in Ramparts magazine and was retrieved from the Anarchist Federation website.
Note: I boycott all things Bezos, so where possible, I provide links to books on Bookshop.org, where a portion of each purchase goes toward independent bookstores.
