It began with an attempt, following an earlier, failed effort by the Sioux, to re-take the prison island, closed in 1953, formerly a piece of tribal land which, by one of the many broken treaties between the U.S. Government and the tribes, was supposed to be returned to them if abandoned. Oakes offered to buy it from the feds for twenty-four dollars, which was of course rejected; during the eighteen-month occupation under extremely difficult circumstances a coalition of tribes camped on the island, including families and children. Oakes’ young daughter with Ann Oakes, Lavonna, was killed in an accidental fall over a railing, causing Oakes and his family to leave the island. He continued his work for tribal justice elsewhere.
This dramatic figure obscures two Native women who were crucial to the eighteen-month occupation, LaNada War Jack (formely Means) and Stella Leach. Leach’s oral history is preserved at the Doris Duke Oral History Collection at the University of New Mexico.
I found some information about LaNada War Jack’s role at Alcatraz and in the Red Power Movement that grew from it in, of all places, Teen Vogue, fenced by photos of girlish fashions. She told the interviewer that Sheila Leach, a Lakota nurse, had run the health service on the island, while Grace Thorpe, a World War II Veteran of the Guinea Campaign with a Bronze Medal for valor, had served as spokesperson while also working to have her father Jim Thorpe’s football medals restored, which eventually they were. She also had warned Oakes’ daughter of the dangers of leaning over the railing where she fell.Oakes and his family, devastated by this tragedy, left Alcatraz where federal agents eventually removed the small group of protesters that remained there after 18 months. He continued to work for tribal justice. On June 11, 1971, Oakes, aged thirty, was murdered by a shot to the heart from a ranger’s pistol as he attempted to shield two Native boys from arrest.
In the Teen Vogue article, LaNada Leach (as she was at the time; the first native student at UC Berkeley) sets the occupation in the context of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, which helped to inspire resistance to the 1953 Federal Termination Act that sought to remove 100 tribes from reservations, imposed taxes, withdrew services, took tribal lands, and sterilized some women—all with the intention of forcing Natives to abandon their languages, traditions and religion and join white America. Due in part to Native activism, President Richard Nixon in 1975 acknowledged the historic injustices Natives had endured and implemented the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, enabling the tribes to establish their own schools and protect their cultures.
Behind Richard Oakes with his powerful personality and dramatic looks, the women who were (and continue to be) central to Native American activism are almost entirely hidden. As LaNada War Jack said in her Teen Vogue interview, the women’s time and energy at Alcatraz was entirely taken up with cooking, washing dishes, and all the other day-to-day services which allowed and allows resistance to continue. She felt that in attempting to influence leaders like Oakes, “she couldn’t get a word in edgewise” because “the men looked down on us,” being dark-skinned members of the patriarchy. The inclusion of the excluded in the ranks of the patriarchy is something rarely mentioned, and the lost contributions of women in all social justice efforts is very rarely acknowledged.
Cooking, cleaning up—essential skills that are without glamor and do not bestow power on the women who continue dutifully to fulfill them. The pandemic is giving us many more examples of the sacrifices of women.
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