Well, I guess the biggest piece of news that has happened out here this past week is the birth of a new boy, Wovoka. My wife had the baby Monday evening. There are some really good feelings out here. The feelings were already here and they seem to have been strengthened. His name is Wovoka, no middle name, no last name, and he is about what I would call the first free Indian born in the past 500 years, because the government is not going to get him. We have somewhere around sixty or seventy people out here. We’re all hanging tough.
Water is still our big number one problem. The number two problem is becoming electricity. We have two generators that are working right now, two large generators, and one of them is supplying power to the lighthouse. The other one is being used down on the mess decks where we are eating. The generators are pulling a lot of duty, so I don’t know how much longer they are going to last. We had visitors last night. We have about forty visitors from the Hemisphere Indian Convention in Tulalip, Washington. These were people with Mad Bear Anderson. Mad Bear is a medicine man from the Iroquois people. Charles Kills Enemy, a Sioux medicine man from Pine Ridge was also here, and one of the chiefs of the Iroquois Six Nations, and the head chief was also here. They were out last night and we had a ceremony on the island, it was a religious ceremony. We had that last night. We have a teepee out here, it was set up in Tulalip, for the convention, and Mad Bear said that there were over sixty tribes who came and paid honor to the teepee and they brought the teepee home. So now it is set up on Alcatraz once again. ~
SOURCE: Johnson, Troy R, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island, 1996.