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