In the early morning hours of November 20, 1969,
78 young Indians arrived on Alcatraz, in San Fran-
cisco Bay, and declared that the island was now
Indian land. Only five years earlier, six Lakota men
had taken over the abandoned federal prison on the
island, similarly claiming it for their people. That
protest was treated as a joke by the government,
the public, and the media. By the late 1960s, how-
ever, Indian activists were not so easily dismissed.
Drawing from the example of the African-Ameri-
can civil rights movement, they had become far
more confident and determined. Reflecting the
new sophistication in Indian activism, the second
occupation drew a far different response than the
first. For 19 months, the second group of Alcatraz
protesters were able to air their many grievances to
the world, as reporters, attracted by their photoge-
nic and articulate spokespeople, flocked to cover
the standoff.
The success of Alcatraz inspired Indians across
the United States to organize protests to demand
better treatment from the government and non-In-
dian society. In 1970 alone, Indians staged scores
of takeovers, including the seizure of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C.,
the establishment of a protest camp at the Badlands
National Monument, and the symbolic occupa-
tions of Mount Rushmore and Plymouth Rock.
But the most dramatic protest in the aftermath of
Alcatraz occurred in 1973 at Wounded Knee, South
Dakota, the site of an 1890 massacre of more than
300 Lakota at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Supported
by Lakota elders, young urban activists of the
American Indian Movement took over Wounded
Knee, to speak out against the tribal government of
South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, which the
protesters accused of systematically harassing the
reservation’s traditionalist faction. News reports of
the event showed hundreds of heavily armed FBI
agents swarming on Wounded Knee during the
two-month protest—an image that only helped to
reinforce the protesters’ claims of abuses perpetrated
by the FBI-supported Pine Ridge government.
By the mid-1970s, the frequency of Indian
protests had declined, but their influence was in-
creasingly felt in federal Indian policy. In part due
to the public’s sympathy for the demands of In-
dian protesters, President Richard Nixon expressed
his commitment to Indian Self-determination.
Originally set forth in a special message to Congress