Every Day is a Good Day by Wilma Mankiller

Author:Wilma Mankiller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Published: 2016-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Wilma Mankiller

Though I have lived most of my life on my grandfather’s Cherokee land allotment in rural Adair County, Oklahoma, I learned a great deal about indigenous people, governance, and land during the twenty years I spent in the San Francisco Bay Area. Soon after my Native American brothers and sisters joined the occupation of Alcatraz Island in late 1969, I made plans to visit the island. The morning I made the short journey to Alcatraz, my heart and mind made a quantum leap forward.

Lady dawn descended on the nearly empty streets of Fisher-man’s Wharf, bearing the gift of a brand-new day. Fishing boats rocked in their slips, awaiting the day’s journey, as shop owners sleepily prepared for the onslaught of tourists. An occasional foghorn or the barking of a stray dog was the only sound other than the steady lap of the ocean against the docks. Alcatraz Island, several miles across San Francisco Bay, was barely visible as I boarded a boat for the former military and federal prison, which had recently been taken over by indigenous people and declared “Indian Land.” Mist and fog gave the island a dreamlike quality that seemed fitting for a place where the American dream was rejected and an Indigenous dream declared.

The young students who occupied Alcatraz Island claimed that federal surplus lands such as Alcatraz should be returned to tribal peoples on legal and moral ground, and that treaties, land rights, and tribal sovereignty should be respected and honored. This was not the first relation­ship between indigenous people and Alcatraz. Long before Euro­peans arrived, Ohlones and other indigenous people of the coast rested and got their bearings on Alcatraz Island, called the Island of the Pelicans (Isla de los Alcatraces) after the seabirds that gathered there. In the late nineteenth century, Modocs and other tribal people were imprisoned at Alcatraz for fighting the United States Army in a desperate attempt to retain their ancestral homelands. When the Spanish first settled in the mid-1700s on the land that is today California, there were more than 275,000 indigenous people living there. That changed very quickly. By 1900, fewer than 16,000 indigenous people remained. It is a miracle that even that many survived. Indigenous people of California endured widespread violence, starvation, disease, genocide, rape, and slavery. As late as 1870, a few communities in California were still paying bounties for Indian scalps or severed heads. One hundred years later, the descendants of some of the indigenous people who survived the conquerors, miners, and settlers joined others at Alcatraz to find their bearings just as their ancestors had done so long ago.

I visited Alcatraz several times during the nineteen-month occupation of the island. At any given time, the Alcatraz community was composed of an eclectic group of indigenous people, activists, civil rights veterans, students, and people who just wanted to be at a “happening.” Richard Oakes, a visionary young Mohawk who emerged as an early spokesman for the Alcatraz occupiers, said, “There are many old prophecies that speak of the younger people rising up and finding a way for the People to live.

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