A long time ago, several young men made up their minds to find the place where the Sun lives and see what the Sun is like. They got ready their bows and arrows, their parched corn and extra moccasins, and started out toward the east. At first, they met tribes they knew, then they came to tribes they had only heard about, and at last to others of which they had never heard.
They found a tribe of root eaters and another of acorn eaters, with great piles of acorn shells near their houses. In one tribe, the young men found a sick man who was dying, and they were told it was the custom there when a man died to bury his wife in the same grave with him. They waited until he was dead, when they saw his friends lower the body into a great pit, so deep and dark that from the top they could not see the bottom. Then a rope was tied around the woman’s body, together with a bundle of pine knots, with a lighted pine knot in her hand. She was lowered into the pit to die in the darkness after the last pine knot had burned.
The young men traveled on until they came at last to the sunrise place where the sky reaches down to the ground. They found that the sky was an arch, or vault, of solid rock hung above the earth. It was always swinging up and down, so that when it went up, there was an open place like a door between the sky and ground, and when it swung back, the door was shut. The Sun came out of this door from the east and climbed along on the inside of the arch. It had a human figure, but was too bright for them to see clearly and too hot to come very near. They waited until the Sun had come out, and then tried to get through while the door was still open, but just as the first young man was in the doorway, the rock came down and crushed him. The other six were afraid to try it. Because they were now at the end of the world, they turned around and started back again, but they had traveled so far that they were old men when they reached home.
* * *
It was on Alcatraz, that irregular oblong hump of barren sandstone stuck in the bay waters between San Francisco and Sausalito, where at long last some Native Americans, including me, truly began to regain our balance.
Alcatraz was a most appropriate site for that watershed event because the earliest people to look on the place were the Ohlones, from the Costanoan family. Long before any Europeans sailed into the bay, the Ohlones and other coastal tribes frequently had paused at the island to get their bearings while navigating choppy seawaters in sleek canoes. Native people did not use the island for a burial site, or build their domed bark and hide houses on the rugged surface. Instead, they saw that it was a place better suited for the ocean birds to rest and preen in the sun.
When the Spaniards came, they found other uses for the island. They fortified it with the guns of conquest. In the late 1700s, they also gave it a name—Isla de los Alcatraces, or “Island of the Pelicans,” after the big white birds that congregated there. Many years later when Anglo settlers took over California, the United States Army turned Alcatraz, as they called it, into a military prison and disciplinary barracks. It was not just for Confederate captives and convict soldiers, but also for the native people whom the whites enslaved.
In the early 1870s, two of those people brought in shackles to the island had fought in the Modoc War, in northern California. Their tribal chief, named Kintpuash, known to the whites as Captain Jack, had led his people in a futile struggle to prevent their removal to a reservation. On Good Friday, April 11, 1873, Captain Jack shot and killed the only general in the U.S. Army to die in the so-called “Indian wars.” For this deed, Captain Jack was hanged along with three of his headmen. The two teenage Modocs sentenced to Alcatraz had been spared the hangman’s noose, but being sent to the island was almost a worse fate. One of them soon died of tuberculosis, and the other no doubt wished he were dead.
Besides illness and foul conditions on the island, the prison guards could be deadly. During the late 1800s, many native people of California were locked away on Alcatraz. So were Paiute people and Chiricahua Apaches, including a friend of Geronimo’s. It is said that to this day, the Apaches of Arizona keep alive a woeful dirge that tells the story of one of their brave warriors who dared go against the white man and was taken manacled to Alka-taz, the lonely island.
In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the city jail population was shipped to Alcatraz for safekeeping. During World War I, conscientious objectors sent from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, took up residence in the island’s honeycomb of cellblocks. Then in 1933, when the army had no more use for the place, Alcatraz was transferred to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. It was transformed into a high-security penitentiary to house the nation’s most incorrigible convicts—those who were regarded as being monstrous, depraved, and beyond all redemption. The first batch arrived in the autumn of 1934. Celebrity inmates included Al Capone, Alvin Karpis, “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Robert Stroud, the famed “Birdman of Alcatraz.”
They were well known to the outside world, but like all the others on “the Rock,” as Alcatraz was commonly called, they were given no special treatment. They had no recreation, no rehabilitation. Most inmates never had a visitor. They spent an average of sixteen to twenty-three hours each day in a cell that measured only five feet by nine feet. Punishment for the slightest violation was immediate and severe. Swift currents of frigid bay water made escape practically impossible, although some convicts who became desperate enough tried to reach the mainland. Three who supposedly escaped the island were never heard of again.
Once a sanctuary for gulls and pelicans, Alcatraz had become an inhumane warehouse for the living dead. It was an island of hate. Because of mounting financial problems and public pressure, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the federal prison to be closed in 1963. For a year after the last inmate was removed, Alcatraz sat like an aging derelict surrounded by water, a symbol of past punishment and acts of brute force. Visitors to San Francisco stood on Fisherman’s Wharf and gazed at “the Rock.” Some of them circled it in tour boats. In the dying sunlight when the fog moved in, it seemed to be only a mirage. The island was no longer as it had been centuries before, when free-spirited native people stopped there as nature’s guests.
On a brisk November day in 1969, it was on this ancient island of mean rock and ruined cellblocks that Native Americans made a stand. Our time in the sun had arrived.
There had been a few victories for native people earlier in the decade, when the winds of change came with the civil-rights movement, and the mood of the nation shifted. Slowly, ever so slowly, it seemed that the white population was beginning to understand that Native Americans also had concerns and needs. By the early sixties, the tribal termination policy had been fully discredited. The suffering of tribes that had been obliged to participate became apparent.
During the present century we have been moving steadily away from all the pervasive paternalism of the 1880’s and ’90’s toward a more wholesome respect for the human dignity of individual Indians as well as the values of age-old tribal cultures.
Phillieo Nash, commissioner of Indian affairs
December 6, 1962
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963
A significant piece of progressive legislation during that decade was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965. This new law allowed Native American organizations and tribes to bypass the BIA while they planned, developed, and implemented their own social, educational, and economic initiatives. For some native communities and reservations, it was the beginning of economic self-determination.
The passage of more reform legislation and judicial action soon followed. Then on March 6, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson, inspired by promises made in the Kennedy years, delivered the first message to Congress on Native American affairs in more than a century. He spoke of providing native people with the freedom “to remain in their homelands, if they choose, without surrendering their dignity; an opportunity to move to the towns and cities of America, if they choose, equipped with the skills to live in equality and dignity.”
Johnson pointed out that the housing situation for most native people was inadequate. He noted that unemployment among native people had reached an astonishing 40 percent, and only half of our youngsters graduated from high school. He called us the forgotten Americans. He stressed that instead of more paternalistic practices, the federal government needed to allow freedom of choice and to protect “the rights of the first Americans to remain Indians while exercising their rights as Americans.”
Congress responded by passing the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, which brought further federal intervention into tribal governments and courts. Ostensibly, the act extended the protection of the United States Bill of Rights to Native Americans, but mostly as those rights related to citizens under tribal governments, not the government of the United States.
The wheels of bureaucracy never turn fast enough. Some elements of the bill were not legislated for more than a decade. Individual Native Americans secured the promise of new rights in the 1960s, but it took many more legal triumphs in the 1970s to win completely the right of self-government that we all were so anxious to obtain. Federal Indian policy still had a long way to go. Endless delays increased our anger and frustration. Before any balance or harmony could be achieved, the archaic federal system that dominated our lives had to be fully rehabilitated. That reform needed to come from within. We wanted to make sure that the government knew this simple fact, and that we had its undivided attention.
Native American activism became more militant for many of those reasons. That is why the native protests and marches of the 1960s were so important. That is why native people seized Alcatraz.
A takeover of the island had been under consideration for some time. In 1964, just one year after the Alcatraz prison operations had been halted, five Sioux people living in the Bay area had made a run at it. Dressed in their full tribal regalia, they landed on Alcatraz and claimed title to the island for their people. Federal marshals quickly moved in, and the “squatters” were forced to leave.
During the years following that first takeover attempt, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors was deluged by proposals for commercial developments on Alcatraz. They included resort hotels, patriotic memorials, public parks, and gambling casinos. One party suggested turning the island into a cemetery. Of the more than five hundred schemes the city officials reviewed, the one that caught the officials’ collective eye was from Texas oil tycoon Lamar Hunt. He offered to pay a reported $2 million for the island in hopes of erecting a shopping and tourist complex, complete with manicured gardens, an underground space museum, and a futuristic tower topped by a revolving restaurant. Hunt said he would preserve the main cellblock for tourists’ enjoyment. In late September of 1969, the supervisors gave Hunt’s proposal their stamp of approval.
That action incensed our local Native American community, especially those involved with the Bay Area United Native American Council and others associated with the American Indian Center. Both of those entities had helped to sponsor the failed occupation of the island in 1964. Alcatraz still had great symbolic value. Almost immediately, planning got under way to launch another occupation. The target date was the summer of 1970.
Before a preliminary course of action could be considered, more disaster struck. On the evening of October 28, 1969, a four-alarm fire of mysterious origin gutted our beloved American Indian Center building in the Mission District. For almost a dozen years, this center had been a home away from home for many of us, perhaps for as many as thirty thousand native people.
Just weeks after the fire, while Alcatraz was returning to the headlines, government officials began to scramble for ways to placate us. They offered available space at the Presidio, the sprawling U.S. military reservation, as a perfect spot for the reestablishment of the Indian Center. I suppose they did not realize the irony of Native Americans retreating to an army fort. The offer was declined, and a temporary center was soon established elsewhere in the Mission District. Although our original building—its entire physical structure—had been decimated, the spirit of the Indian Center could not be destroyed.
The fire had a galvanizing effect on everyone in the local Native American community. Time was of the essence. A statement had to be delivered. It would require action and not mere words. We could not sit in the ashes and weep. We had to pick ourselves up and go on. We could not afford to wait for the next summer. The occupation of Alcatraz had to occur as soon as possible. And it did.
On November 9, 1969, fourteen native people hitched a ride with Sausalito yachtsmen on a charter boat headed to Alcatraz Island. Most of them were students from Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco State College. They were led by a visionary young Mohawk man named Richard Oakes and by Adam Nordwall, a Chippewa from Minnesota.
They landed at about six o’clock in the evening and claimed the island “in the name of Indians of All Tribes.” To them, “the Rock” symbolized our lost lands. They declared it Indian property under the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. That document contained a provision allowing any male Native American older than eighteen whose tribe was party to the treaty to file for a homestead on abandoned or unused federal property. It was the same argument the five Sioux had made when they went to the island in 1964.
Beyond the terms of the treaty, the activists even offered to buy Alcatraz from the government. To do that, they tapped into the sixty dollars that made up the kitty of the San Francisco State College Native American studies program. Then they purchased twenty-four dollars’ worth of glass beads and red cloth to offer in fair exchange for the island. After all, they reasoned, the white men had made a similar offer when purchasing a larger island they had named Manhattan more than three hundred years before.
This time, there were were no takers. After nineteen hours, Coast Guard cutters pulled alongside the island docks, and the native people were escorted from Alcatraz.
But they did not stay away. They could not do that. They had to go back to “the Rock.” In the early hours of November 20, eighty-nine native people—men, women, and children from a variety of tribes—returned to Alcatraz Island. They brought with them tangible items such as food, water, and sleeping bags, and intangible ones such as the hopes, aspirations, and dreams of all of us from the Native American community who remained behind. They also took along plenty of resolve.
This time, their stay would last not nineteen hours, but nineteen months. The island population sometimes swelled to as many as one thousand. All sorts of people came. They came from tiny Alaskan native villages, from the great Iroquois Nation, the Northwest Coast, from Oklahoma, South Dakota, Montana, the surrounding California native communities, and every region of the United States. Some came bearing gifts of fresh salmon or dried meat. Others came bearing the gift of a special song, ceremony, or prayer. Vine Deloria, Jr., the Sioux who wrote the book which became our Indian manifesto, Custer Died for Your Sins, was a visitor. So were Anthony Quinn, Jane Fonda, Jonathan Winters, Ed Ames, and Merv Griffin. Candice Bergen brought her sleeping bag and spent a night on the floor of the clinic. There were boats loaded with politicians, reporters, photographers, and curiosity seekers running the Coast Guard blockades. Donations of food and clothing and offers of support came from churches and synagogues, women’s organizations, labor unions, and the Black Panthers. Troops of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts visited the island, bringing with them Christmas toys for the native children.
Although Alcatraz ultimately would not remain a sovereign Indian nation, the incredible publicity generated by the occupation served all of us well by dramatizing the injustices that the modern Native Americans have endured at the hands of white America. The Alcatraz experience nurtured a sense among us that anything was possible—even, perhaps, justice for native people.
We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of the land for their own to be held in trust by the American Indian Affairs and by the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs to hold in perpetuity—for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, 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. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men.
Proclamation from Alcatraz Indians to the United States
November 20, 1969
Before it was over, four of my brothers and sisters and their children had joined the original band on the island. I, too, would become totally engulfed by the Native American movement, largely because of the impact that the Alcatraz occupation made on me. Ironically, the occupation of Alcatraz—a former prison—was extremely liberating for me. As a result, I consciously took a path I still find myself on today as I continue to work for the revitalization of tribal communities
From those unforgettable events that flashed like bright comets years ago, I have tried to retain valuable chunks of experience along with some of youth’s raw courage. It is my hope that those idealistic moments have blended with the perspective that luckily comes with maturity. It makes for a vintage mixture that has helped to sustain me against all odds, against real and imaginary foes, and even against death itself.
Still, no matter where my path leads me, I must always remember where the journey started. It was in San Francisco—at Alcatraz, and at the American Indian Center, and in my own home where, starting about the time of the Alcatraz takeover, native people often came to sip coffee, make plans, and build indestructible dreams. The occupation of Alcatraz excited me like nothing ever had before. It helped to center me and caused me to focus on my own rich and valuable Cherokee heritage.
My brother Richard, six years my junior, was the first of the Mankiller siblings who joined the other native people at Alcatraz. He later served on the Alcatraz Council, the panel of men and women who tried to maintain a semblance of order on the island. After Richard, the next ones to go were my younger sister Vanessa and our little brother James.
Finally, my sister Linda wanted to go out and be with the others. Only twenty years old, Linda already had three small children, and she was separated from her husband. She and her kids were temporarily staying with Hugo and me. When she made up her mind to go, I accompanied Linda and her children to the island. At the docks, we saw a lot of people we knew. We rode out together in a boat supplied by Credence Clearwater Revival that was called the Clearwater. Of the four Mankillers who went to Alcatraz, Linda ended up staying there the longest. She remained until June of 1971, when federal marshals finally removed the last few native occupants.
I will always be very proud of my brothers and sisters for going to Alcatraz. I did not stay there, but always returned to the mainland, where I felt I could be of more service by remaining active in the various support efforts. I found myself spending more time at the new home of the American Indian Center. It was a key command post where much of the fund-raising activities for Alcatraz took place, and almost all of the communications were funneled to and from the island.
The entire Alcatraz occupation was such an important period for me. Every day that passed seemed to give me more self-respect and sense of pride. Much of the credit for that awakening has to go to the young men and women who first went to Alcatraz and helped so many of us return to the correct way of thinking. One of the most influential was Richard Oakes.
Oakes was a student at San Francisco State. Formerly an ironworker in New York, he moved to California, where he drove a truck. He then worked at Warren’s, an Indian bar in the Mission District, while he went back to college. He was instrumental in starting the Native American studies program at San Francisco State, and he soon became one of the strongest voices of activism and social protest at the American Indian Center.
I became well acquainted with Richard Oakes during the occupation, and I found him to be one of our most articulate leaders. Although only in his late twenties when I met him, Richard spoke persuasively about treaty rights and the need for America to honor its legal commitments to native people. He spoke of the various tribal histories and diverse cultures, and of the many contributions Native Americans have made to contemporary society. His words, considered so radical in the 1970s, are strikingly similar to the language of many of the relatively moderate tribal leaders of today.
Alcatraz was symbolic to a lot of people, and it meant something real to a lot of people. There are many old prophecies that speak of the younger people rising up and finding a way for the People to live. The Hopi, the spiritual leaders of the Indian people, have a prophecy that is at least 1,200 years old. It says that the People would be pushed off their land from the East to the West, and when they reached the Westernmost tip of America, they would begin to take back the land that was stolen from them.
There was one old man who came on the island. He must have been eighty or ninety years old. When he stepped up on the dock, he was overjoyed. He stood there for a minute and then said, “At last, I am free.”
Alcatraz was a place where thousands of people had been imprisoned, some of them Indians. We sensed the spirits of the prisoners. At times it was spooky, but mostly the spirit of mercy was in the air. The spirits were free. They mingled with the spirits of the Indians that came on the island and hoped for a better future.
Richard Oakes, 1972
from Ramparts, written shortly before his death
Richard and his wife, Anne, a Pomo woman, had five young children and took care of several others. In January of 1970, after they had resided on the island for almost three months, one of their daughters, Yvonne, was playing in a deserted prison building when she fell down a three-story stairwell. She was rushed to the mainland, but she died two days later. Annie had had a premonition that something bad was going to happen to her family.
The girl’s death cast a veil of sorrow over the island. Although Richard explained that even in death his daughter was still within the circle of life, the grief was too much. He and Annie packed up their few possessions and left with their other children. Later that year, Richard helped the Pit River Indians in their struggle over land rights with a powerful utility company. He endured tear gas, billy clubs, and getting tossed in jail, only to end up in a bar brawl back in San Francisco where two men beat him to a pulp with pool cues. Richard survived, but he was never able to return to his earlier level of activism. He moved farther north to settle in the Pomo country near Santa Rosa. In September of 1972, a caretaker of a YMCA camp claimed that Richard had threatened him with a knife. The white man pulled a gun and shot Richard Oakes dead. He was in his thirtieth year.
Annie floundered after Richard’s death. I made it a point to visit her several times at her home. Gradually, she began to withdraw more and more from community work, and finally we lost touch. But whenever I hear the name Annie or see a Cherokee woman whose demeanor reminds me of my friend, I think of that resilient Pomo woman and of her children and of the daughter who fell to her death on Alcatraz, and I always feel profoundly sad. I pray that Annie is doing well. I also think of Richard Oakes, the visionary young man whose turbulence helped us all find harmony.
We did a lot of singing in those days. I remember the fires at nighttime, the cold of the night, the singing around the campfire of the songs that aren’t shared by the white people … the songs of friendship, the songs of understanding. We did a lot of singing. We sang into the early hours of the morning. It was beautiful to behold and beautiful to listen to.
Richard Oakes, 1972
Another of the eloquent native leaders to emerge from the Alcatraz Island experience was John Trudell, a wiry young Lakota man—one of the best thinkers I have ever met. Immensely creative and irreverent, Trudell is still absolutely committed to whatever he is doing. That has not changed.
John and his wife Lou and their two daughters, Maurie and Tara, came up from Los Angeles to join the Indians of All Tribes, as the group at Alcatraz was called. I thought they were the most incompatible couple I had ever met. John was hyperactive and serious, while Lou was level and steady but with a great sense of humor. She became the consummate earth mother on the island and later for the entire East Bay Indian community. John and Lou did have one common interest—a great love of politics. Their third child, a son they named Wovoka after the Paiute medicine man who had originated the Ghost Dance, was born on Alcatraz.
During the occupation, John served as the announcer on Radio Free Alcatraz, which was beamed for thirty minutes each evening over Berkeley’s radio station KPFA. He often spoke of creating a complex on Alcatraz that would include an educational center for Native American studies, a historical archives and museum, and a spiritual center. Grace Thorpe, a Sac and Fox and the daughter of all-time Olympic hero Jim Thorpe of Oklahoma, was a guest on his program, as were many other activists.
Lou became a close friend of mine, and I always have maintained a great deal of affection and respect for John. Even when the federal government rejected all Native American claims to Alcatraz and suggested that the island be used as a park, John and the others would not budge.
We will no longer be museum pieces, tourist attractions and politicians’ playthings. There will be no park on this island, because it changes the whole meaning of what we are here for.
John Trudell
New York Times, April 9, 1970
Throughout the Alcatraz experience and afterward, I met so many people from other tribes who had a major and enduring effect on me. They changed how I perceived myself as a woman and as a Cherokee.
Gustine Moppin—the Klamath woman whom I had known since I was a young girl, the person who had convinced me to continue my education—was a true inspiration. Gustine was the personification of the Cherokee concept of “having a good mind.” Unfailingly cheerful even in the worst of circumstances, she devoted every waking moment to helping others.
Gustine thought I had the potential to do something with my life. She encouraged and supported me through those years as my marriage eroded and I struggled for independence. I appreciated that. I was always happy that we reconnected during the Alcatraz experience. Years later when she developed diabetes, we had many talks about the toll this dreaded disease takes on native people. She lost an arm to diabetes and then had to undergo dialysis when her kidneys failed. Ultimately, she was confined to a wheelchair. When I last saw her in the winter of 1990, Gustine was quite frail, but she had not stopped helping people. She was busy counseling other amputees on independent living. She still served on the boards of several Indian agencies. Soon after that visit, Gustine passed into the other world. I lost a sister. The Bay area Native American community lost its matriarch.
Another California relocatee from those bittersweet years whom I stayed in contact with was Bill Wahpepah, who was Kickapoo and Sac and Fox. I worked very closely with Bill on several projects, including an alternative school, youth services, and an Indian adult education center. He brought some of the primary AIM leaders—Dennis Banks, Carter Camp, and Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt—to his home. Clyde Bellecourt, one of AIM’s founders, was especially likable. He came to the Bay area with an entourage of native children. It was obvious how much he cared about them and how hard he worked to help them.
Leonard Crow Dog, a vital cog in the Native American movement, also came to Wahpepah’s place. I liked him quite well. He maintained a certain presence that reminded me of the Cherokee elders I knew when I was a little girl back in Oklahoma. On one occasion, Leonard led an impressive Lakota ceremony in the adult education building in Oakland. He and his wife, Mary, their young son, and other people traveled in a large truck. They carried a sacred buffalo skull with them wherever they went.
Bill Wahpepah was always there for us. He opened his home to everyone, especially the Indian children. Most of them were second-generation relocatees who would have been out on the streets without Bill’s guidance. I saw Bill weep in utter frustration over a young man who continued to sniff paint. I knew those tears were real. They came from a man who had survived alcoholism and heroin addiction to emerge in the 1970s as one of our finest spokespersons for native rights. He traveled all over the world, telling anyone who would listen about the problems of Native Americans, while he searched for answers and solutions.
Bill, whose life had been hard, died much too young. He was in his late forties and at the height of his activism when he walked into spirit country after a sudden illness. Like so many others who had been relocated, Bill had always spoken of someday returning to live among his people in Oklahoma. That was not to be. He was taken home to Shawnee, Oklahoma, for a tribal burial.
The same was true for my own father. Only in death did he return to the place where he was born.
My father’s death tore through my spirit like a blade of lightning. It came during the Alcatraz occupation. By that time, my parents had long since left San Francisco and Hunter’s Point. The spice company my father worked for had relocated, so my folks had moved farther south, down the coast to a small town not too far from Salinas and Monterey, places that John Steinbeck had immortalized in his books. Life had finally leveled out for my father and mother. It was the best period of their life together. At last, they had a decent place to live. Most of their kids were grown and making their ways in the world, and several of us were deeply involved in the Native American rights movement.
Just when it appeared that all was well, more misfortune came calling. My father began to experience high blood pressure and severe kidney problems. The diagnosis was not good—end-stage polycystic kidney disease. At that time, the options for treatment were quite limited. Kidney transplants, which are widely performed today, were experimental and not available at all to persons older than fifty-five. That meant my father was just barely eliminated from consideration. Dialysis, although readily available, was not nearly as efficient as it is now.
We were only starting to adjust to the shock of my father’s illness when I experienced more health problems of my own. Once again, I began to have urinary-tract infections and the discomfort associated with kidney problems, just as I had when I was pregnant with my first daughter. After extensive testing to find out why I continued to be plagued with the infections, I also was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease. I had inherited it from my father. All of us were stunned.
The physicians told me that this genetic condition is characterized by the appearance of many cysts on the kidneys which may continue to grow and overcome the healthy tissue until the kidneys fail. They said that in mild cases of the disease, total kidney loss is certainly not inevitable. In fact, some people live out their lives without even knowing they have the disease because it has produced no symptoms.
But further tests revealed that just like my father, I had a severe form of the disease. In both of our cases, the disease was progressive and incurable. Mine was not nearly as advanced as it was with my father, but all predictions were that I could expect to experience kidney failure by the time I reached my early to mid-thirties, sometime in the 1980s. I reacted to the diagnosis almost with relief. At least I finally had an explanation for the repeated infections, which sometimes required days of hospitalization.
My doctor asked me to limit my protein intake, have my kidney functions monitored regularly, and rest as much as possible. Afterward, the woman in the hospital bed next to mine, who had overheard the discussion, asked if there was anything she could do for me. I told her yes she could, and I asked her for a cigarette. I had not smoked for about a year, but from that moment forward, it became a habit again until I stopped once and for all in 1980.
Because of the hereditary question, I immediately had my two girls, Gina and Felicia, tested for any possible signs of kidney disease. Thankfully, the results were negative, and both of them were clear of any symptoms. Then I arranged for a tubal ligation. I considered it unfair to risk having another child who might end up with a deadly illness.
Dad’s health steadily declined, but we tried to make him as comfortable as possible. His approval and support were always very important to me, even after I was a grown woman with children of my own. We had always shared an interest in political debate, in the community around us, and in books. Now we shared this family disease.
It was so difficult to watch my father slowly leave us. He hated being sick, he hated having to give up his job, and he hated taking medicine. My mother practically had to force him to see the doctor for regular visits. We all went to see him as often as we could. He understood our involvement in Alcatraz—that we were fighting for native rights. A conservative Cherokee full-blood, Dad was pleased that his children were taking a stand. I have a strong memory of a Thanksgiving visit with my dad. He was bedfast, and while the rest of the family was busy out in the kitchen getting all the little ones fed, I brought him a plate of food. We ate together, just the two of us, a rare treat in a family as large as ours. He smiled at me and told me he was proud to have a daughter who had become a revolutionary. As it turned out, that was to be his final Thanksgiving dinner.
The end was very sad. Because my parents had no health insurance, we children brought Dad to San Francisco General Hospital, where he could be placed on dialysis. His reaction to the procedure was not at all good. He had to undergo cardiac surgery to remove fluid that was gathering in his chest. Afterward, I went to his room and walked over to his bed. A huge scar and dressing were across his heart. My father looked up and said, “Look what they have done to me now.”
After undergoing that surgery, he failed very quickly. We sent the boat out to Alcatraz to retrieve my brothers and sisters. The good doctors worked ever so hard to save him. They ran up and down the halls and did all they could. It was not enough. With his children and his wife gathered around his bed, my father died. He was fifty-six years old. It was February of 1971.
We never even considered leaving him in California. We brought Charley Mankiller back home to his everlasting hills of Oklahoma. My brother Don and my mother made the arrangements. Some of us flew back to Oklahoma, others drove across country to get there. Even though the lives of my brothers and sisters had taken different paths, my father’s death brought us together. We took him to Echota Cemetery, just a few miles from where I now live. Waiting for him were the graves and spirits of his parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and old friends, all of them long departed to the other world. It was a cold February day. We formed a line of cars and pickups and followed the hearse from the funeral home in Stilwell out to the graveyard.
Even in my grief, the countryside looked so familiar to me. I was back home again. Rocky Mountain is sparsely populated, but as our procession of vehicles wound slowly down the road to the cemetery, people came outside and stood in their yards to watch us pass. You could almost hear them saying, “There goes Charley Mankiller. They are bringing Charley Mankiller home.”
Death will come, always out of season.
Omaha Chief Big Elk
Our immortality comes from our relationship with Mother Earth. We are a part of the land in every real sense. Our ancestors were buried in the land and became part of the earth. We grew up among the dust of our ancestors. Our struggle to preserve the Indian ways is tied up with our struggle to preserve the ecological balance. The two things are almost the same.
Carter Camp, AIM leader
Oklahoma Today, May–June 1992
Most people who spoke or sang at my father’s funeral service did so in our Cherokee language. Some people literally walked out of the woods to attend the service. Others came from as far away as Kansas and North Carolina. He was buried beside his parents and a child my mother had miscarried between my birth and Linda’s. There was something very natural about laying him to rest in that ground near people he loved. It was so peaceful, and I knew the trees would protect him.
Still, as we left and made our way back to California, we were all numb. The anchor that had always kept our family together was gone. In many ways, none of us would ever be the same again.
For my mother, it was a most terrible time. Part of her spirit went with my father. They had jointly fought for his life. Now that he was gone, she looked as if she had waged her last great battle. From then on, life for her would never be the same. They were so connected. She had done her best to prepare for his loss, but the transition was difficult. She had been married to him since she was a fifteen-year-old girl, and over the course of more than thirty years, they had gone through so much together. They had raised a family, buried children, and gone through the trials of relocation. Besides loving him, my mother truly respected and liked my father. Watching someone you care so much about suffer through such indignity and dehumanization is not easy. But she made the necessary adjustments and, like the rest of us, she persevered.
I returned to Native American issues for my comfort. The Alcatraz occupation came to a halt a few months after my father’s death. Then I became even more involved with community work. I knew for sure that I could no longer remain content as a housewife.
Hugo was not at all in favor of my involvement in Alcatraz or any of the other projects I became associated with in the Bay area. During that period of my awakening, he was most unhappy whenever I held meetings at our home. He also opposed the idea of my traveling anywhere without him, even if only for a short time. Of course, he neglected to remember that a few years earlier, when he had got itchy feet and was gone for weeks at a stretch traveling around the world with his cousins in the merchant marine, I had learned to adjust.
Times for the two of us had changed so radically. I had become a much stronger person and was more than ready to assert my independence. So when Hugo informed me that I could not have a car, I did not acquiesce. Instead, I went straight to the bank, withdrew some money, and bought an inexpensive Mazda. It took a little bit of doing, but I figured out how to operate the stick shift on those terrific San Francisco hills.
Buying that little red car without my husband’s consent or knowledge was my first act of rebellion against a lifestyle that I had come to believe was too narrow and confining for me. I wanted to break free to experience all the changes going on around me—the politics, literature, art, music, and the role of women. But until I bought that little red Mazda, I was unwilling to take any risks to achieve more independence. Once I had the car, I traveled to many tribal events throughout California and even in Oregon and Washington.
Eliminating the patriarchal and racist base of the existing social system requires a revolution, not a reform.
Premier issue of Ms. magazine, 1971
All around me, there was so much going on. There was a great deal to accomplish. One task I took on was acting as director of the Native American Youth Center in East Oakland. I literally discovered the building that housed the organization, on the corner of Fruitvale and East Fourteenth streets. I drafted some volunteers to slap fresh paint on the place, pulled together some school curricula and a cultural program, and opened the doors. My experience at the San Francisco Indian Center was put to good use. Some of the young people who made their way to this new youth center were dropouts. Others came there at the end of the school day.
I suppose there is much to be said for ignorance. I had no idea what I was doing when I became involved at the youth center, but I learned quickly—on the job. My enthusiasm seemed to make up for any lack of skills. There were field trips to plan and coordinate, and visits to various tribal functions all over northern California. At the center, while the kids did their homework after school, they listened to the music of Paul Ortega, Jim Pepper, or some of the other talented native singers and musicians who came there. All the while, we tried to instill pride in our Native American heritage and history, and to encourage our young people to use that pride as a source of strength to survive the tough streets of East Oakland.
We also worked on basic educational needs. I worked very hard with a young Klamath girl to get her to return to school. I scraped up a little bit of money to pay her, and she helped me with the center’s office work. She was just fine with running errands, but when it came to jotting down telephone messages or filing, she became terrified. Finally, she broke down and admitted that she had absolutely no reading skills at all. I immediately got her into a literacy program.
At the youth center, I also learned valuable lessons about self-help. When I had no clue where I was going to come up with the money needed for a renovation project, I went to a bar about a block from the center called Chicken’s Place. The sister of my friend Gustine was the owner, and many of the native people of East Oakland went there. I stepped inside and asked for volunteers. Suddenly, to my great surprise and delight, I had several people on their feet, all ready to get to work. I was even more amazed by their ability and commitment. From then on, whenever we needed funds for a field trip or warm bodies to do some work, I went straight to Chicken’s Place. The folks there never let me down.
A little of that absolute faith in our ability to get things done by helping one another sustained me later when I returned to Oklahoma. But it was in Oakland where I formed a belief that poor people, particularly poor American Indian people, have a lot more potential and many more answers to problems than they are ever given a chance to realize.
Beyond the youth center, I also became a volunteer worker for the Pit River people in their fierce legal battle with the powerful Pacific Gas and Electric Company over the rights to millions of acres of the tribe’s northern California land. This was the tribe that my old friend Richard Oakes had tried to help. I saw a story on the six o’clock television news about the tribe’s efforts to reclaim ancestral lands. They were rural people—a very gutsy tribe just trying to get back what was rightfully theirs. Something about them reminded me of the Cherokees. I heard their lawyer speaking on the news, and afterward I called him up and said that I would like to volunteer my services. He said that would be just fine, and I began an almost five-year association with that tribe. It lasted until the mid-1970s, when I finally left Hugo and California behind.
During the time I volunteered for the Pit River people, I absorbed a great deal of the history and culture of the native tribes in California. Most of the time, I stayed quite busy at the tribe’s legal offices in San Francisco, where I helped to organize a legal defense fund. But frequently, my daughters and I would visit the traditional leaders out on their land. Whenever we went to Pit River country, we stayed in a small cabin not far from the home of Raymond and Marie Lego.
Raymond was a traditional tribal leader, and the Lego home became the center of activity for those of us taking part in the land fight. Often in the evening, we sat on the front porch, and Raymond and Marie told us about their long struggle to get back the land. Sometimes Raymond would bring out an old cardboard box filled with tribal letters and documents, which he treated as though they were sacred objects. We were privileged to be able to see those things and to spend that time with such people. I felt at home there. The Legos grew a garden. They hunted, and lived a simple life. The demeanor and lifestyle of the Pit River people put me in mind of my own people back in eastern Oklahoma.
From my time with the Pit River tribe, I came away with so much information I would later use. I learned about treaty rights and international law. Everywhere my girls and I went during the 1970s in California, we received an education. Those were fine trips. We drove to Mendocino on the northern shore of a half-moon-shaped bay. We followed the Pacific coast. We visited with Pomo people I had met at Alcatraz, and we gathered seaweed with them along the shore. Collecting seaweed was one of their seasonal rituals, and we placed what we found in special baskets that were family heirlooms. The seaweed was quickly fried in very hot grease and wrapped in thick bread. It was delicious.
We went to Kashia, a Pomo rancheria in the mountains near Santa Rosa. Only about five acres in size, Kashia is where some of the activists sought refuge after the 1973 AIM takeover at the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Wounded Knee was the site of the 1890 massacre where, it is said, the Lakota Nation’s sacred hoop was broken and where many dreams died with the slaughtered native people. Some of the soldiers who participated in the killings even received medals from the United States government. Russell Means, John Trudell, and other strong activists went to Wounded Knee in 1973 to demand reforms. Their seventy-two-day standoff with the FBI ended in a shoot-out and deaths on both sides, but it focused more attention on the injustices in Indian life.
My brother Richard was at Wounded Knee. After Alcatraz, he had worked at a television station in San Francisco, but he left to go to Wounded Knee because he felt it was important. My mother was so worried that he would end up getting shot, but he was not hurt. Like many other young native men of that time, Richard heard the call to help the people at Pine Ridge, and he went. Whether the occupation of Wounded Knee helped or hurt Pine Ridge continues to be the subject of debate among the people most affected—those who live on Pine Ridge Reservation.
There was still much talk of the bloodshed at Wounded Knee when my girls and I camped at Kashia. We stayed with the parents of my friend Maxine Steele. Her brother Charles had gone to Wounded Knee. We cooked our meals outside, and we talked. We felt it was a magical place. It still is today. There are several Indian doctors there, mostly women. We attended dances in the traditional Pomo round house. Under the stars, we listened to stories of history, medicine, and ceremonies.
All of it was a remarkable experience. All of those trips and visits. All of the music and dancing. All of the hard, hard work. All of the time spent in the fight for Alcatraz, at the youth center, with the Pit River people gave me precious knowledge. All of the people I encountered—the militants, the wise elders, the keepers of the medicine, the storytellers—were my teachers, my best teachers. I knew my education would never be complete. In a way, it was only beginning. I felt like a newborn whose eyes have just opened to the first light.
More and more, I found my eyes turning away from the sea and the setting sun. I looked to the east, where the sun begins its daily journey. That was where I had to go, not to heal for a few weeks after a marital squabble, not to lay a loved one to rest and then leave again—I had to go back to stay. Back to the land of my birth, back to the soil and trees my grandfather had touched, back to the animals and birds whose calls I had memorized as a girl when we packed our things and left on a westbound train so very long ago. The circle had to be completed. It was so simple, so easy.
I was going home.