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The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian SelfDetermination and the Rise of Indian Activism. By Troy R. Johnson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. xii, 273 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-252-02254-8. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-25206585-9.)
The extended occupation of the former federal penal compound at Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay from 1969 to 1971 was a watershed event in the contemporary struggle for indigenous rights in the United States. Undertaken by a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes (IAT), the occupation galvanized streams of native activism as diverse as those represented in the fishing rights struggles of the Pacific Northwest, the "academic insurgency" of the recently emergent National Indian Youth Council, confrontational strategies such as those employed by the then-embryonic American Indian Movement (AlM), and the lobbying...