Al Silbowitz (1969)
Radio Free Alcatraz, Pacifica Radio
Al Silbowitz: For tonight’s Radio Free Alcatraz program, I’ll be talking with John Trudell. John is a young Santee Sioux who comes from Nebraska. John is communications director for the Alcatraz Council for the Indians on Alcatraz and has been conducting programs on Alcatraz for KPFA and the other Pacifica stations since they began on December 22.
John, to begin with, I’d like to ask you a little bit about yourself. You’ve told me previously about some of your background. You spent some time on the reservation in Nebraska and you’ve done a lot of other things. I think some of them would be of interest to our audience.
John Trudell: I stayed on the reservation until I was about five or six, and then my family moved. I went back in 1961, when I was fifteen, I think. I stayed there until the summer of 1963 and I joined the navy and I left. I stayed in the navy four years. After I got out of the navy, I went to work as a shoe salesman. That lasted about four months, and then I quit to go to school, which I was doing when the Alcatraz movement took place. I dropped all my studies and moved up here so I could work on this.
Graffiti welcoming Indians to Alcatraz Island, originally painted during the Native American Occupation
AS: What were you studying at the time?
JT: Radio and television programming and production.
AS: It’s fortunate we ran into you.
JT: Yes. I find this to be much more satisfying than sitting in school learning. Time to put into practice a little of what I picked up the last couple of years.
AS: How old are you, John?
JT: Twenty-three.
AS: You have a family, I understand.
JT: Yes, I have two little girls, and we’re expecting in August.
AS: Are all of you living on the island?
JT: Yes, we’ve been living on the island since I guess about the 5th of December. I came up the last weekend in November to check the situation out, and I liked what I saw so I went back to San Bernardino and got my family. I just dropped everything there and relocated up here.
AS: Our audience has come to understand that Alcatraz is kind of barren—there is not much in the way of food or water, electricity is intermittent at best, and there’s no telephone service and so on. You said something to me some time ago about the fact that for a reservation it’s actually in very good condition.
JT: Yes, I know the GSA [General Services Administration] and the Public Health Department made the statement one time that they were going to have to rip us off the island because of improper sanitation facilities. If they’re going to take us off the island for that, then I think they’re going to have to improve conditions on the reservations, because although we have no central heating and we haven’t got any steady electricity here, water is not a problem. When the army stops giving us water, then we’re going to run into some hassle. Even with all these problems, it’s the same as being on the reservation.
I’ve had people say that it’s really courageous for you people to be doing this. We’ve all been through it before, just in a different place. It’s the same game—it just has a different name now. Alcatraz is nothing but a rock to many people, but it’s our rock. We can develop it and we can make things work for the Indian people, so it’s more than just a rock to us. It’s maybe a stepping stone to a better future—we would like to think of it as [one].
AS: I’ve heard many Indians now saying that the Alcatraz invasion is the Alcatraz movement. What does that mean?
JT: With Alcatraz, we have a chance to unite American Indian people as they’ve never been united before or never had the opportunity to do. Because when we were still fighting with the United States government, the government put a policy in effect that they would break down the Indian people so that they would never become a threat, never be able to fight the United States government again. Part of this program was to break down the Indian nations, break down the tribes, break down the families, break down the individuals, give us nothing constructive to do, and then time will take care of the rest.
AS: Also to exploit the divisions between the tribes.
JT: Yes.
AS: The fact that there were so many small groups . . .
JT: It’s just pitting man against man and family against family, tribe against tribe, because there are many tribes in the United States, and for many of us the East Coast Indians didn’t know anything about the plains Indians or a thing about the West Coast Indians. They have many culturally different backgrounds, just [due to] the way we are situated geographically. It’s been easy for the government once they accomplished this, taking children away from their families and sending them off to school, so [they] broke down the family unity, tore down our religion—took everything we had except our pride in being Indian, something they can’t take.
I’d like to think we’ve never been defeated. Maybe we’ve been stopped for a while, but we haven’t been defeated. I think this is one way of showing you can kick a dog so long, and then the dog’s either gonna die or get up and bite you, and we’re not ready to die.
AS: I think many people in our audience may not realize, if they’re not scholars in history, that many, many battles that took place—armed confrontations between Native Americans on the plains, for example, and United States Calvary, as they were called then—ended in Indian victories.
JT: Especially around the time that Custer got what he had coming to him.
AS: That’s right, Custer had it coming.
JT: The Sioux people fought three major battles in that period of time with the United States troops and won all three of them. These battles were predicted by some of the visionary men of the tribe. I’ve done some reading on battles of the past and various other Indian and white dealings. Like with the Sand Creek Massacre that Reverend Colonel Chivington led, the army had a great policy of killing women and children, but if the man had the gun, then stay away from the man. No sense in me getting killed while I’m killing you. . . . Basically, they would come up in the mornings, get the Indians by surprise—basically get the women and children, stop the reproductive cycle. I believe this is a form of genocide, but they did it then. They waged war on our women and children.
AS: This was, by the way, an articulated policy of the United States government. There was a policy of extermination.
JT: Yes, the United States government. Well no, I can’t say the United States government on this other deal, but various governments—territorial governments or whatever—used to pay bounty for Indian scalps. In this area, in the western area, the bounty ranged [so that] if you got a woman or a child you got more money. On the East Coast, in the early 1700s it was something like forty pounds for a man’s scalp, and forty pounds in those days—that’s a lot of heavy bread.
AS: A lot of money.
JT: Yes.
AS: Well, without dwelling on the past, this time it’ll be much more, I’m sure, covered in later programs from Alcatraz. Tell us about some of your plans and hopes for the Radio Free Alcatraz project. What do you think we can do? You spoke about some unification possibilities for the future uniting [of] Indian people.
JT: Well, with Radio Free Alcatraz and with the island itself, we have a chance here of getting urban Indian people and reservation Indian people active. This island and the radio project on the island—this doesn’t just belong to the people on the island. It belongs to Indian people. If they have any governmental problems, like where their water rights are being taken away from them or their land, we want them to let us know or come out here and they can speak. We’ve got to get this information out. We’ve never had a chance to do this before.
One of my own personal foes is the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I dislike that agency very much, because of what they have done to Indian people in the past and what they’re continuing to do. I think many of these things have to be exposed. We’ve been an invisible people for too long. To be completely truthful about it, the government did to us what the American public let them get away with. They just kind of turn their backs so the government can do these things to us.
Well now we’re going to try and stop all that. We’re going to try and change it, because we’ve been around for a long time and our numbers are increasing. I’d say we are going to be around for quite a while to come yet and we might as well have a good life while we’re here, just as well as the next man.
AS: You talked to me about a possible tape network or tape service that could be conducted to involve reservations as well as Indians in urban areas. Can you tell us a little bit about what you might plan on that?
JT: Yes, with the tape service, we would be doing tapes on the island, taping talks with leaders or people there, on various important things and items that the reservation should be aware of . . . but they don’t have access to this through other media. We’re going to put this on tape and send it to the reservations so that they can get this information also. What they can do for us in return is they can put their problems on tape. Any information they have for us they can send back to us because with the station we hope to bring out, as I stated earlier, governmental problems. We want to renew our cultural awareness and we want Indian poetry and the songs and the old stories because no matter how people have put us down we had a lot on the ball and there’s a lot of beauty in some of the old stories. The beauty is in the Indian philosophy, because ours was a philosophy of “I’ll respect my brother’s dream and he’ll respect mine.”
Vine Deloria once said that . . . the people in the Western Hemisphere had a civilization of wisdom and Europeans [who] came and took from us had a civilization of knowledge. Well, look what knowledge has gotten us. Maybe we ought to get back to a little bit of wisdom.
AS: Knowledge as we know is power, and power is not necessarily wise.
JT: People are still fighting wars, still taking things that don’t belong to them. Power brings on more greed. What do we need with greed? That won’t solve any problems.
AS: Are there things, John, that our listening audience might be able to do to assist? For example, you asked on the air for people to write to you. I think that would be helpful, and perhaps we ought to tell them to do that again.
JT: If anyone has any questions, and I will try to answer these letters personally . . . I will answer over the air as many as possible, because if anyone’s interested, we want them to have the information that they would like to have. Also, for support, all people have to do is—if you can’t give money or other materialistic things—write a letter. Write a letter to President Nixon or to [Secretary of the Interior Walter] Hickle or to your congressman. Just write a letter and say we support what is going on on Alcatraz.
AS: Thank you, John Trudell. This has been tonight’s program, Radio Alcatraz. On succeeding evenings, you will be able to hear live from Alcatraz John Trudell, many other Indian people, visitors to the island who come from reservations from around the country, spokesmen from various tribal groups, to discuss Indian history, Indian culture, and Indian affairs.
We look forward to those programs and hope they may continue for quite some time. John, thank you for coming in and talking with us.
JT: Oh, yes, thank you.
Edited transcript of this radio broadcast transcription printed with permission from the Pacifica Radio Archives.
