ABSTRACT
IN COMBINATION WITH THE FISHING RIGHTS STRUGGLES OF THE PUYALLUP, Nisqually, Muckleshoot, and other nations in the Pacific Northwest from 1965 to 1970, the 1969-71 occupation of Alcatraz Island by the San Francisco Bay Area’s Indians of All Tribes coalition ushered in a decade-long period of uncompromising and intensely confrontational American Indian political activism.1 Unprecedented in modem U.S. history, the phenomenon represented by Alcatraz also marked the inception of a process of official repression of indigenous activists without contemporary North American parallel in its virulence and lethal effects.2
