The 1969 Takeover of Alcatraz and the Refuse of Shame

• In Event: Anticolonial Worldmaking

Abstract

On the morning of November 20th, 1969, Indians of All Tribes (IAT) departed from their relocated home of San Francisco to Alcatraz Island and began what would become a 19 month takeover that ignited the Red Power Movement. Before the takeover, Mohawk student organizer Richard Oakes and Red Lake Band Chippewa organizer Adam Fortunate Eagle coordinated a symbolic protest on November 9. Upon arrival, they claimed the island by “right of discovery.” Though removed by the Coast Guard, the duo returned to the island later that day to deliver IAT’s Alcatraz Proclamation the following morning. Surrounded by a sea of white male reporters and federal authorities, Oakes recited each line, pausing to look up from his loose-leaf and witness his audience’s response.

The document presents an alternate reality in which social hierarchies are subverted. Mocking federal Indian treaties, the document declares on behalf of all Indigenous Americans that the land understood to be Alcatraz Island has been reclaimed “by the right of discovery,” which is followed by an elaboration of how land will be purchased through proper treaty relations with settler inhabitants in “order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state.” This demands, the document simulates, holding lands in Indigenous trust “in perpetuity for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea.”

After Oakes delivered the Proclamation’s last sentence, Regional Director of the General Services Administration, Thomas Hannon, questioned IAT’s intent. “Richard, you are presenting me with this now?” Hannon pressed. “Yes,” Oakes replied. Though Hannon follows with an explanation of the island’s legal custodian and the city of San Francisco and the Department of Interiors’ role in working out a “future for the island,” he returns to the Proclamation, asking Oakes: “in presenting this to me what do you want me to do with it? Do you have anything in mind?” Grinning, Oakes tells Hannon to “Hold on to it. React to it.”

Video footage of the exchange does not capture Hannon’s reaction to Oakes’ provocation. Regardless, the interaction speaks to the moment in which moral appeals of shame extended by the politically weak are wielded in the face of power. A mixture of “humor, serious intentions, and hope,” humor was deemed central to the document’s message. But the humor wasn’t simply “the laughing kind; it should also have a sting.” Its stinging satirical bite was meant to disturb and unsettle, to prompt settler reaction to the shame of the nation.

Shame scripts not only mark IAT’s public statements like the Proclamation; they also manifested in aesthetic form on the island. Signs warning “Keep Off U.S. Property” were revised to “Keep Off Indian Property;” images of bald eagles and American flags, and other visual representations of American nationalism were painted with red ink; prison cells were designated to house government officials; and graffiti mocking American patriotism were written on the prison walls. I do not read the shame leveraged in IAT’s Proclamation and graffiti as attempts to transform white audiences into sympathetic allies, nor do I believe that the text was simply attempting to mock the state.
In this paper I argue that their actions constitute alternatives to peoplehood, self-determination, and political life beyond settler-induced paralysis by calling for a response and an engagement with the state on Indigenous grounds. This is done through dramaturgical action that fuses shame and satire together for pedagogical, rather than punitive, purpose for audiences and those enacting shame. My reading of IAT documents and actions during the takeover reveals IAT’s fusion of satire and shame as moments that trouble settler legitimacy and open the possibility of restructuring the world from Alcatraz’s view. Asking what role shame plays in articulating, “generating, and foreclosing political horizons,” I argue that the takeover of Alcatraz leveraged language and aesthetic practices of satirical shame as modes of self-authorization and political subject formation. Specifically, I locate in the Proclamation and IAT’s political performance of the mock trial Indians v. US Government (1969) an external and internal pedagogical mode of shame.

Performed across North America, the Proclamation empowered urban and rural Indigenous peoples to identify as members of a pan-Indigenous collective empowered to claim an identity with pride rather than shame. While shame contained in the Proclamation and satirical play is an expression of self-authorization and self-rule, IAT placed their takeover Alcatraz as an action intimately connected to other struggles caught between the geographic bookends of US empire. Liberating Alcatraz was for all. I flesh out IAT’s political imaginary as one tied to anti-imperial and antiracist commitments in solidarity with freedom struggles across seemingly discrete projects of global empire.

Author

• Leila Ben Abdallah, Cornell University