JOHN TRUDELL: I stayed on the reservation until I was about six. Five or six. Then my family moved. I went back in 1961. I was fifteen years old, I think. I stayed there until the summer of 1963, then I joined the Navy and I left. I stayed in the Navy for four years. After I got out I went to work as a shoe salesman. That lasted about four months and then I quit to go to school, which I was doing when the Alcatraz movement took place. So I dropped all my studies and moved up here so I could work with this.
AL SILBOWITZ: What were you studying at the time?
Radio and television. Programming and production.
It’s fortunate we ran into you. [laughs]
Yes. I find this to be much more satisfying than sitting in school learning. I mean, it’s time to put into practice a little of what I picked up the last couple of years.
How old are you John?
23
And you have a family I understand?
Yes, I have two little girls and we’re expecting in August.
Are all of you living on the island now?
Yes, we’ve been living on the island. I came up the last weekend in November to kind of check the situation out and I liked what I saw so I went back to San Bernardino and got my family and kind of just dropped everything there and relocated up here.
Our audience has come to understand that Alcatraz is kind of barren. There’s not much in the way of food or water and electricity is, uh, intermittent to say the best and there’s no telephone service and so on. You said something to me some time ago about the fact that, uh, for a reservation it’s actually in very good condition.
Yes, I know the GSA [General Services Administration] and the public health department made the statement one time that they were going to have to rip us off the island because of improper sanitation facilities. But if they are going to take us off the island out there for that, then I think you’re going to have to improve conditions on the reservations.
Water is a problem. When the Army stops giving us water then we’re gonna start running into some hassles. But even with all these problems it’s the same as being on the reservation. I’ve had people say that it’s really courageous for you people to be doing this. But we’ve all been through it before, just in a different place. It’s the same game, just has a different name now.
Alcatraz is nothing but a rock to many people. But it’s our rock, and we can develop it and we can make things work for the Indian people. So it’s more than just a rock to us. It’s maybe a stepping stone to a better future. I would like to think of it as that.
I’ve heard many Indians now saying that the Alcatraz invasion is the Alcatraz movement. What does that mean?
Well I’d say that the Alcatraz movement is; we have a chance to unite the American Indian people as they’ve never been united before. Or never had the opportunity to do. Because when we were still fighting with the United States government, the government put in a policy, in effect that they would break down the Indian people so that they would never become a threat. Never be able to fight the United States government again. And part of this program was to break down the Indian nations, break down the tribes, break down the families, break down the individuals. Give us nothing constructive to do, and then time will take care of the rest.
And also to exploit the divisions between the tribes? The fact there were so many small groups.
Yes, it’s just pit man against man, family against family, and tribe against tribe. Because there are many tribes in the United States, and many of us east coast Indians didn’t know anything about the Plains Indians, or they about the west coast Indians, so I mean we have many culturally different backgrounds, just the way we were situated geographically. And so it’s been easy for the government to accomplish this. Taking children away from their families and sending them off to school to break down the family unity. They tore down our religion. Took everything we had except our pride in being Indian. Something they can’t take. And now, well I like to think we’ve never been defeated. Maybe we’ve been stopped for a while, but we haven’t been defeated. And I think this is one way of showing it. You can kick a dog so long and then the dog is either gonna die or get up and bite you. We’re not ready to die. ~
SOURCE: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb2308