The Fight to Occupy Alcatraz

Persecution of Native peoples in the United States accelerated in the 20th Century. Allotment laws, which had started with the Dawes Act of 1887, broke up tribal lands; specialized, re-education-focused boarding schools, introduced around the same time and ramped up through the 1930s, stole children and languages; and the termination policies that cropped up in the 1950s to disband tribes sought to eliminate Native people altogether as political entities. By 1969, indigenous people in the U.S. felt it was time to act.

That year, Vine Deloria Jr., a member of the Standing Rock Sioux, published his seminal book Custer Died for Your Sins, an incisive, and hilarious indictment of the shallow American understanding of the modern Indigenous communities and nations they shared the land with. That November, a group of Native activists landed on the island of Alcatraz in an act of protest against the U.S. government. They proceeded to occupy Alcatraz for 19 months.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155354/fight-occupy-alcatraz