DENNY SMITHSON: I’m with John Trudell. John has been out here most of the year that the people have been on Alcatraz. John, when did you come to the island?
JOHN TRUDELL: I came out here November 29th. The anniversary of the occupation is today. My anniversary being here is still nine days away.
You’ve been here now for almost a year and you’ve seen a lot of changes on the island. 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 the island has gone through in terms of the occupation and how it has grown and how it has changed. Can you think back to November 29th 1969 when you arrived and what it was like then?
Yeah, back in November of last year is 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, you know, two to three hundred people living out here at one time. And then right after that the schools were out for semester breaks, quarter breaks, whatever. Had more people coming out. And at the time we were saying we wanted the deed to the island and the money to build a cultural center here. Well, since that time the only thing we still want is the 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 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. But from that time we kind of evolved to this period now we’re not so much concerned with what middle class America thinks of us. We’re concerned about our image with 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 just by the physical occupation. And in the follow up, such as Pit River and the Taos, the tension that’s been put out on the Taos people trying to get their land back in Blue Lake, the attention on the Washington fishing rights. These are different organizations or groups of people standing up to the government. Standing up to the government when we’re right. And this is how we’re pushing out this Indian nationalism. We’re not setting out to create a false sense of patriotism because we can look at this society and see all kinds of stupid things done in the name of patriotism. So nationalism. Pride in the Indian. It’s happening. I see the Indian unity coming and that’s what our whole objective is now. Our goal is whatever we do, do it for Indian people.
I know what the government solution to this is. That is to come and take us off, and if that happens, we win, and if they give us the deed to the Island, we win. So that is a pretty good feeling. We win. A damn good feeling. We don’t want just the small little battle, we are shooting for the whole works. We’re shooting for the overall victory. And in the process of doing so this hasn’t changed from the beginning to now. We’re not going to tell anyone how we think they should do it. You know, we’re not trying to tell the outside society that this is the way you’ve got to get the change. All we’re saying to outside society is get off our back. Let us make our own change and make some of the economics available that are necessary for us to do this.
You’ve expended a lot of your own energy in the last year, and doing a lot of traveling around the country and talking to people and so on. Have you seen that kind of unity among Indians of all tribes growing as you go to different places and speak, and say what’s happening here on Alcatraz?
Yes I see it coming. Most of my attention has been focused on young people. It’s nothing deliberate that I’ve planned or anything, it’s just been things happening. Most of the speaking that I go out to do is at universities, therefore the young people are there. We don’t have many Indians, a large group of Indian people in any one university. I’ve spoken to young Indian groups through state organizations, state Indian organizations, spoken to their young groups. And in the case of Oklahoma, in the Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity Organization I spoke to all levels of Indian; Reservation, urban, young, middle, middle age, old. And I see it. I see it through my feelings, you know, I can feel what’s there. I can feel the response. Number one is, we get out here in the Midwest or in other parts of the mainland, and the fact that Indian people are holding Alcatraz on our own terms. This builds a lot of pride in the people back on the mainland. I talk with the young and I meet with them. And just talk about what’s going on. And they’re eager to absorb it. They want more of it. They want it. One time when I was in Oklahoma I asked all the young kids just starting high school. I asked them who George Washington was and who Abraham Lincoln was, and who George Armstrong Custer was, people like this, and they said they knew. I mean you know, they could tell who that was. So then I ask them who Red Lake was or Tecumseh or Mangas Coloradas, [Chief] Joseph, Sitting Bull. Alright, of all those names I asked, they knew who Joseph and Sitting Bull were by name. So I gave them a little information, what little information I had on Joseph and Sitting Bull. On Tecumseh and Mangas Colorado. What I did in essence was, I gave crumbs and they took cake. And when they start taking cake from crumbs you know it’s there. And this has happened at a lot of places that I’ve traveled to. Alcatraz hasn’t been the only participant sending what we like to call, action groups. You know, we want action. There’s organizations in the Midwest, like the American Indian Movement out of Minneapolis. Most of the places I’ve been lately, they’ve had representatives there. And so the young people now are turning to action people and they’re saying, tell us what you know, or just come and speak, say what you got to say, and we’ll listen to it. And in the course of listening they really hear what we’ve got to say, you know, and they want to act on it. University of Wisconsin in Madison. The students there are getting a big hassle by the university. You know the university doesn’t want to kick loose funds to set up programs because these things take time, and don’t have enough money in the budget, you know. So this is how areas of Indian unity, I think, will happen. So what we told the students at Madison was, alright you guys, you get yourselves together. You come up with the Native American studies program that you want. But you’ve got to do it, you know, you do it within the state of Wisconsin however you hassle it out. And you come up with a program. You submit it to the school. And they won’t buy it, then we’ll come back. We’ll come back and we’ll help you. Alcatraz will send representatives. American Indian Movement, it’ll send them. The drums organization from the Great Lakes area in Detroit. They’ll send representatives. This is how the unity comes. For our own safety and survival we’ve all got to hold hands and unite as Indians. The unity that I see coming is each of us fighting our own battles, our own way, and then kicking in support. When one group [or] organization runs into trouble, the rest of us come in. And that’s what we’re working for. And it’s starting to happen. The action-people also are starting to get out to more and more universities. More and more organizations. To speak to the young people. Even some areas speak to the old people. But, we are not the plague that we would have been two years ago, you know, we’re not bad guys anymore, even in the sense of Alcatraz. When Alcatraz first started Indian people were really behind it but then there were individuals that spoke out against it. People hooked in through the BIA. There aren’t as many of them doing that anymore, as there were a year ago. I mean even that’s a sign. There aren’t very many Indian people who come out publicly and attack us. Whereas a year ago they did. Some of them would’ve knocked themselves loose getting up to that microphone to condemn what we were doing, because they were afraid of the BIA. So, we’re getting there.
What is the status, as far as you know now, of Alcatraz and the US government, and the Indians that are here?
Well the status is, we won’t deal with the government. It’s just as simple as that. We’re tired of being lied to. The government never wants to sit down and talk about serious issues, you know, what we want to talk about. When they send someone there with a little authority. To deal. Then maybe we’ll sit down and talk. But the government stand is going to have to change. Because when we were negotiating with Robert Robertson, he’s the executive director of the National Council of Indian opportunity out of Vice President Agnew’s office, and he was the man we were negotiating with for the deed to the island, for the funding, all of this. And so after we dropped the funding requirement we said all we need is the deed and Robertson comes back with, well this is a nation of law, you know, and it’s illegal. There is no legal way we can turn the deed over to you. And so we’ve got to live up to the law. So we turn around and we ask him what about the state of Washington where the Indian people there, they’re fishing under treaty? That’s law. And the state is coming in and breaking that treaty, you know, destroying these people’s equipment. Locking them up. Harassing them. Won’t let them fish. By the Law, these Indians are only trying to live by the law, what about that? How come the government’s letting that slip by. And he said that’s not the issue. See, and that is the issue. What’s going on in Washington is the issue. What’s going on here is the issue. The government taking the Blue Lake away from the Taos people. That’s the issue. The government setting prices on land that they admit that they stole. Such as the Pitt River case. That’s the issue. The government allowing the BIA to take our young away from us and send them to schools that don’t give any education, you know, that only destroy the child. That’s the issue. The system saying that our religion isn’t any good and only Christianity, that’s gonna save us all, and they won’t allow us to practice our religion in the sense that the other religions are carried on. That our religion isn’t recognized by the system. That’s the issue. The fact that they’re still stealing land. That they’re breaking hunting and fishing rights, that’s the issue. The fact that they’re taking our people and drafting them into their army and sending them off to fight wars that our people got no right being in. That’s the issue. See the issues, when they want to talk about the issues, we’ll deal with them again. But the whole thing comes down to here is, this is America and according to the Constitution it’s a democracy and all men are created equal and everyone’s free. Well from our understanding, and the Indian way of freedom, and equality, that means a free equal man has respect from another man, or race of people. When you have respect you have your own dignity, your own self bearing, and your own pride. You control your own life. Well that’s not the case of what’s happening here. So if we’re going to be free, we’ll have to get that freedom on our own. But we’re not, not any longer are we going to allow the system to go around telling everybody that we are free when we’re not. You know, and it’s not really that hard of a battle because all we have to do is want the freedom. And not be willing to compromise. When you’re right, you don’t make deals. Indian people have always been right in dealing with the government, and we’ve always settled for a compromise and look what’s happened to us. So no longer are we going to buy that. We don’t know what will happen. We don’t really care. Because things can’t get much worse.
A last question I guess, since it looks like the press conference is trying to get under way over there. What is life on Alcatraz like now? Roughly how many people are there here? Are living conditions acceptable, and so on?
Well, we still have about eighty people here. The number changes throughout the year. We are back to almost the same number we started out with a year ago. And out here, now that the government took the water away and shut our power off, we haul our own water. Sometimes we have difficulty with heating, like getting firewood is a hassle. So we started tearing down wooden cottages on the island for firewood. For electrical needs we have a thirty kilowatt generator that was bought for us. It supplies most of our electrical needs. I compare it to living on a reservation. You know, we are better off than some reservations even though we don’t have a lot of things. We are used to it. We are used to living this kind of life. It’s not like we all left good homes and came out here and all of the sudden started enduring hardship. These aren’t hardships to us. To a great deal of white society, it would be. But to us it is natural. It’s just like our culture. It’s our culture almost to the extent that this is what we have always lived in. The biggest thing that I am pleased with here is our children. The fact that our children are free. We have a lot of reporters and people come out here and say, what kind of education are you giving your children? When they think of education, they only relate to the classroom, you know. They relate to propagandizing, and what we are trying to relate to out here is real education. We try to see to it that the children get reading, writing, and arithmetic, and whatever, spelling, some of the basics, so they can survive out there if they choose to do so. But the rest of the education is an education of freedom. These children living out here are never going to forget what the government has said or done. These kids will never forget it. They are growing up with it. We are not pumping political awareness into their heads, but it is there. It’s available for them to pick up on if they want to. We don’t have to worry about our kids getting run over by cars, you know, anything like that out here. They take care of each other. They’re very independent. My youngest daughter is two and a half years old and she’ll leave my apartment and she’ll come over here to eat chow. She does it by herself. She’ll get up in the morning and go eat. Pick up her plate walk to the chow line. She’ll do it at night. Other kids take care of her. If she starts to get into trouble. The kids have very much freedom here. All the kids. We let them do mainly what they want to because we want them to enjoy. We want them to get this education. They’re getting a feeling, a sense of security. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. But for right now today and for the next week or whatever as long as we’re here there is no social worker, no BIA person going to tell us that we’re unfit for our children and take our children away from us and send him to a school or whatever it is. See they can’t do that out here.
This is part of what makes our determination hang in there, you know. We look at the lack of materialism and the lack of luxuries, such as running water and all this. Then we look back at what we got as people, you know, and it all balances out, you know. . .. Here we’ve got a sense of security. We expect one day the man to come in and try to rip us off. But when he comes, he has got to come and get us all at once. It is directed so that we have a sense of security in a very insecure situation, because as long as we are here and as long as he doesn’t come to bust us, nothing is going to happen to us out here. We are free, and that’s what the whole thing is all about. ~
I just looked up and saw the light. Is it running these days? What do you call it? The lighthouse?
Well, we started running it. That’s a policy that has changed. Like, when the government shut off the power to the lighthouse we said, well we’ll run it, you know. And we started running it. Matter of fact we even sacrificed a generator up there to run that lighthouse when we were doing without down here in our own living. And then when the government said they were going to turn the power back on to the lighthouse because the maritime unions and all the fishermen and everybody in the Bay Area put pressure on Congressmen to get the power restored because of safety. It’s a guiding light to everyone. So now we don’t care if that light goes on or not really. If they can do that to get a light turned on. I want to know why they couldn’t do that to get our water back. Or to get the power returned to us. They’ll do it for themselves. Now, if they want to be like that well the hell with it, you know. Respect is a two way street all the way down the line. They help us, we help them. They don’t want to help us, then we don’t care about that either really. But, we’re finding out what token sympathy is and we’re finding out what real tokenism is all the way down the line. It’s a very educational place out here. One of these days I think an appropriate name for this island would be the isle of changes. Because I’ve seen a lot of them come. I mean through the people coming out here. Even seen the changes that take place in a lot of people’s awareness. I’ve seen people come out here that were alcoholics. Literally alcoholics, that don’t drink anymore. They control it, you know. Seen all that happen. So it’s like, none of this has been wasted at all. No matter what happens in the future this hasn’t been wasted one bit. As a matter of fact everyone out here deserves an “A.”
[laughing] That’s slipping back into that old mold John.
[laughing] That’s assimilation.
Thanks a lot John. ~
SOURCE: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-28-p843r0q996