Interviews With Indians on the First Anniversary of the Alcatraz Occupation (1970)

It's next to the living quarters here at Alcatraz. I'm with John Tridel and John has been out here most of the year that the people have been on Alcatraz. John, when did you come to the island? I came out here November 29th. The occupation, the anniversary of the occupation is today. My anniversary being here is still nine days away. Well, you've been here now for almost a year and you've seen a lot of changes on the island and a lot of people come and a lot of people go. I wonder if we could just talk about that for a few minutes. Specifically about the phases that the island has gone through in terms of the occupation and how it's grown and how it's changed. Can you think back to November 29th, 1969 and when you arrived and what it was like then? Yeah, it's back in November of last year when I first came out here. There was a lot of excitement here, there were a lot of people. The island, the occupation was very new. We had large numbers of people out here living out here anywhere.

Two to three hundred people living out here at one time. Then right after that came, the schools were out for semester breaks, quarter breaks, had more people coming out. And at the time we were saying we wanted to deed to the island and money to build a cultural center here. Well, since that time, the only thing we still want to deed to the island, we don't ask for the money anymore. And at that time in the beginning of the year when the occupation first started, we were more concerned, we were very concerned with how the public would react to what we were doing. We kind of patterned our occupation so as not to offend the public too much because that's where our support was or sympathy. Allow us to stay here. Well, from that time we've kind of evolved through this period now where we're not so much concerned with what middle-class America thinks of us. We're concerned with our image within the Indian people.

We're here under the name of Indians of all tribes. And so now what we're working to do is create that good image with our own people. We're not so much concerned with John Q. Public thinks about us anymore because John Q. Public is exactly that. Indian people are our own people. So these are the areas we're working for now. We would like to see a strong sense of Indian nationalism built. And I think Alcatraz has started doing that. Alcatraz started doing that in just by the physical occupation