JOHN TRUDELL: Kinda had to find us a new place to live so we figured this would be as good a spot as any. It’s a military base. Belongs to the Federal Government they say. They’re not using it. We could use it. We need it, so we’re here. To put it mildly, we’re pretty upset about the way the government handled the Alcatraz situation.
IINTERVIEWER: Do you expect that people will come here and will live in your attempt to make it a community, or is it a gesture of defiance of the government?
I think they’re both the same. It seems like when you get Indian people together now, and just want to live, that’s defying to the government. See, what we want is to be left alone. We want to be left alone, and we want the right to guide our own lives. We don’t believe in the great white father. We think that it’s a myth. The dude’s dead ya know. He never existed.
Do you expect to live up here, to establish a community up here similar to the one that was set up on Alcatraz?
If you don’t agree with the federal government’s chain of thought or if you don’t agree with what they tell you, then they react against it very harshly you know. They bring in all these armed people to Alcatraz, and they knew we were unarmed out there. They did it at People’s Park or Isla Vista. When people stand up for their rights they have a tendency to react, you know to show you their strength, and when they show you their strength they’re always showing you how many guns they’ve got.
We’re tired, but we’re tired of the last fifty years of not saying nothing, you know, being quiet and letting them ignore us and do what they wanted. That’s the only thing we’re tired of.
We’ve been negotiating with the government on the quiet at their request. We were negotiating about settling the Alcatraz issue, and during the course of negotiations they guaranteed us, Browning the federal attorney in San Francisco, guaranteed us that no action would be taken against Alcatraz people until the negotiations were completed, you know one way or the other, good or bad, but he said no action will be taken and then they call our attorney Don Jalnik Thursday evening about four or four-thirty and told him that they would have word for us concerning the negotiations, they would have word for us today, Monday. So they called Don and told him that on Thursday, and then Friday they went out and they took the people off the island.
To move against you here just as they did in Alcatraz?
If I were to think like the federal government seems to think, probably. That’s the way that they’re mind, or whoever does the thinking up there, if anybody does, seems to run. ~
SOURCE: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/187788#:~:text=Features%20inteviews%20with%20a%20local,in%20the%20Great%20White%20Father