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Native Resistance: An Intergenerational Fight for Survival and Life
In 1969, Dr. LaNada War Jack and students throughout California united to take over Alcatraz Island in peaceful protest against the federal government’s ill treatment of the Native Indigenous people and and repeatedly breaking of treaties with tribes. This ended the Indian Termination Policies, began the self-determination era and facilitated certain subsequent government funded policies for Indian tribes nationwide while recovering millions of acres of land.
Dr. War Jack's latest book, Native Resistance, chronicles the events tied to the genocide of Native people in the United States — from forced removal to federal reservations and her life during the late sixties at UC Berkeley, the Occupation of Alcatraz Island, Pyramid Lake Water War in Nevada, to the Standing Rock Resistance in North Dakota.
LaNada was the first Indian student at UC Berkeley in 1968 and has been our leader for fifty years while maintaining the purity of her beliefs all the way through. She is also one of the first Native people to earn a doctoral degree. LaNada was the leader of the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969, which led to the most earth-shaking changes in Indian Country during my lifetime. The return of the Blue Lake to the Pueblo of Taos, the return of Mount Adams to the Yakama Tribe, the return of sacred lands to the Pit River Tribe, and many more such actions were the direct result of her leadership. The Alcatraz occupation led to the most significant changes in Indian Country: the end of PL280 by President Richard M. Nixon, as well as the most important Indian policy statement for Native people.
—Dean Chavers, PhD, Author of Racism in Indian Country and twenty other books
This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the takeover of Alcatraz Island or the Red Power movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Before Alcatraz, LaNada helped lead the Third World Liberation Front and creation of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, LaNada played a central leadership role in one of the most important demonstrations in all of American Indian history. LaNada, alongside Richard Oakes and hundreds of other Indigenous peoples, ignited a movement that forever altered the course of Indigenous rights. Native Resistance includes a definitive first-hand account of the Alcatraz occupation.
—Kent Blansett, Author of A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement
This book demonstrates a unique perspective on Indigenous movements throughout history. A must read for everyone!
—Jessica James, Doctoral Student, Idaho State University, Pocatello; Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska; MA, University of Kansas; and BA and AA, Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas
LaNada has been a warrior and sacrificed herself for her Native community for the fifty-plus years I’ve known her, and now she shares the wisdom and introspection of that warrior with us. El es Dios!
—Ysidro Macias, Author of The Compassion of the Feathered Serpent: A Chicano Worldview; Walking the Red Road on Chicanismo; The Domingo Martinez Paredez Mayan Reader
You are on NDN land! Every high school and college student needs to read this book!
—Stormee Kipp, Senior Class President, Big Sky High School, Missoula, Montana; Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas; University of Antelope Valley, California; and the University of Montana at Missoula
Dr. War Jack's latest book, Native Resistance, chronicles the events tied to the genocide of Native people in the United States — from forced removal to federal reservations and her life during the late sixties at UC Berkeley, the Occupation of Alcatraz Island, Pyramid Lake Water War in Nevada, to the Standing Rock Resistance in North Dakota.
LaNada was the first Indian student at UC Berkeley in 1968 and has been our leader for fifty years while maintaining the purity of her beliefs all the way through. She is also one of the first Native people to earn a doctoral degree. LaNada was the leader of the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969, which led to the most earth-shaking changes in Indian Country during my lifetime. The return of the Blue Lake to the Pueblo of Taos, the return of Mount Adams to the Yakama Tribe, the return of sacred lands to the Pit River Tribe, and many more such actions were the direct result of her leadership. The Alcatraz occupation led to the most significant changes in Indian Country: the end of PL280 by President Richard M. Nixon, as well as the most important Indian policy statement for Native people.
—Dean Chavers, PhD, Author of Racism in Indian Country and twenty other books
This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the takeover of Alcatraz Island or the Red Power movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Before Alcatraz, LaNada helped lead the Third World Liberation Front and creation of Native American Studies at UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, LaNada played a central leadership role in one of the most important demonstrations in all of American Indian history. LaNada, alongside Richard Oakes and hundreds of other Indigenous peoples, ignited a movement that forever altered the course of Indigenous rights. Native Resistance includes a definitive first-hand account of the Alcatraz occupation.
—Kent Blansett, Author of A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement
This book demonstrates a unique perspective on Indigenous movements throughout history. A must read for everyone!
—Jessica James, Doctoral Student, Idaho State University, Pocatello; Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska; MA, University of Kansas; and BA and AA, Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas
LaNada has been a warrior and sacrificed herself for her Native community for the fifty-plus years I’ve known her, and now she shares the wisdom and introspection of that warrior with us. El es Dios!
—Ysidro Macias, Author of The Compassion of the Feathered Serpent: A Chicano Worldview; Walking the Red Road on Chicanismo; The Domingo Martinez Paredez Mayan Reader
You are on NDN land! Every high school and college student needs to read this book!
—Stormee Kipp, Senior Class President, Big Sky High School, Missoula, Montana; Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas; University of Antelope Valley, California; and the University of Montana at Missoula
- GenresNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
First published November 11, 2019
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March 13, 2021
LaNada War Jack is a powerful voice who “participated as the first Native American component of the first Ethnic Studies Program in the UC statewide effort in establishing Native American Studies, African American Studies, Chicano Studies and Asian Studies.”
War Jack learned early on from her bold and “beautiful” Mother how to push back on unjust authority and “speak up for myself and present an acceptable picture” so she wouldn’t be “serving time in some reform school in Nevada,” but never forgot her “father’s words to never be ashamed of who I am because I was Native. I knew I was just as capable and intelligent as the rest of my classmates, if not more…My pain turned into rebellion, and whenever I thought it was appropriate, I broke the rules.”
Her writing style is straightforward, too, and I’m not surprised she recruited more Native American students for Cal Berkeley (she was the first), organized and chaired “our own Native American Student Organization,” “coordinated strike activities with my male counterparts” in the Third World Liberation Strike and for years worked with her father, Edward Boyer, on land and treaty rights for the Bannock-Shoshone and other tribes when she went home to Idaho’s Fort Hall Reservation land and lived in Nevada.
Instigating 1969’s Alcatraz Island Occupation with SFSU’s Richard Oakes and Native students “turned that whole tide of assimilation” (into white society after 1953’s Termination Act) and became a milestone for Native Americans. She says that after Alcatraz, “People were being proud of who they were as native people” for the first time in a century.
In the meantime and after, she negotiated land rights claims, legal and tribal planning with changing jurisdictions when Federal Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) legislation, actions, policies and cooptation of tribal governments caused Native peoples more stress, poverty and human rights violations.
The Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 had admitted that the U.S. Government had “taken tribal lands illegally,” and that unoccupied land should be ceded back to the Indians, but was only one of many broken promises and cultural misunderstandings further marred by settler overrun, unpaid or unusable compensations and rampant resource extraction and destruction, “encroachment of lands and endangerment of their waters” all the way through Standing Rock, where she demonstrated, raised funds and organized, too.
She stresses her academic and legal work more than her personal life in all this, but started college in 1968, had four children with three husbands (as I did), which takes downplayed dedication, ingenuity and courage, but is actually not all that unusual for women of our generation and independent states of mind. “(T)he Shoshone nation… held their women in higher regard” according to Lewis and Clark Expedition journals, and War Jack stresses the matrilineal gender equity and respect for women and mothers that persisted within tribes well into the 20th Century in spite of displacement, disease and discrimination against tribal and family units.
When she went back to D.C. to fight for litigation to confirm Indian treaty rights to the Island abandoned by the government, she “did not realize that this was all turning into a copy of the White man’s patriarchal system…it was morphing into a warrior society... A warrior society is good but is balanced with other societies in which women hold respect and have a voice.” (p. 172-3) When she told AIM leaders, including her brother-in-law, Russell Means, not to let the tribal leaders bring in guns, she said “Any Indian resistance had to be in a peaceful manner… Remember what happened to the Black Panthers when they took up arms? They Got killed…”
“Without the women being recognized on an equal, bilateral basis, men in control become unbalanced and anything can happen….now the men would not give me the time or respect to hear me out or consider the consequences. This is the patriarchy, where the men are in control and become everything we were fighting and resisting.” (p 196-97) (Tell it like it is, Sister.)
This speaks to me LOUDLY of our need for “intersectionality” in all we do in progressive movements in Berkeley and beyond. On Alcatraz, “we formed an island organization and it was called “Indians of All Tribes,”” because they knew the media, police and agents provocateurs would try to pull them apart the way they attacked tribal council members and chiefs on the reservations with bribes, slander and political favors. (LGBTQ, Black council people and Latinx Mayor re: “anti-racist” empty-condo “recommendations?”)
She backed out of the spotlight and takeover of the BIA office in Washington and AIM at Wounded Knee to work with the Native American Rights Fund to keep trying to enforce the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) and in various legal cases. Fishing rights in Washington State salmon rivers, Alaskan Indigenous land bearing oil and gold; Menominee people, land, reservation and timber rights / ownership and Hopis fighting off the Peabody Coal Company all needed help; as did supporting the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 to “protect Indian culture and tribal integrity from the unnecessary removal of Indian children by state and federal agencies,” development and passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and other legislation.
She is a Big Picture thinker. Sometimes confusing (I wish there was an Index!), but always ringing with the integrity of what she knows, what she feels, what she’s seen and how it all affects thour people, not just her own. She places her own story within the larger context of rapacious European arrivals both awed and terrified by a completely foreign landscape, creatures and inhabitants; fleeing poverty, disease and cultural and religious horrors and persecutions themselves; fueled first by the “Doctrine of Discovery” that claimed Native homelands were “uninhabited,” full of “souls” that needed saving, dreams of what author Malcolm Margolin calls “Utopian Visionaries” and “hatred of the flesh.”
For War Jack, this was followed by “lies, deceit and pure mythology” (p. 141) that brought imperial, militarist hierarchies, weird customs, dreadful diseases and shocking “religious” practices to peoples harmoniously entrenched in thour environments for millennia.
“Native people have tried to promote and communicate an understanding of our natural laws that are connected to all life on Earth, taking only what is needed with prayers and respect.” (p. 19) I reply “Good idea!” as the Inuit man in Never Cry Wolf always said when the biologist said anything obvious, intelligent or outrageous from his “White outsider” scientific viewpoint.
There is courage, persistence, endurance, beauty, spirit and resilience here; but also a whole lot of suffering and pain. What to call the now-unnamed Kroeber Hall or rename the Phoebe Hearst Museum, still holding 8,189 human remains and more than 200,000 “funerary artifacts?” How about Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum West, or Tuol Sleng (Khmer Rouge) Museum of Genocide East? Seriously. Lest we forget…
“The problem is our attitude toward the natural world.” Oren Lyons, Standing on Sacred Ground, “Profit and Loss.”
“If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it.” Nikki Giovanni
War Jack learned early on from her bold and “beautiful” Mother how to push back on unjust authority and “speak up for myself and present an acceptable picture” so she wouldn’t be “serving time in some reform school in Nevada,” but never forgot her “father’s words to never be ashamed of who I am because I was Native. I knew I was just as capable and intelligent as the rest of my classmates, if not more…My pain turned into rebellion, and whenever I thought it was appropriate, I broke the rules.”
Her writing style is straightforward, too, and I’m not surprised she recruited more Native American students for Cal Berkeley (she was the first), organized and chaired “our own Native American Student Organization,” “coordinated strike activities with my male counterparts” in the Third World Liberation Strike and for years worked with her father, Edward Boyer, on land and treaty rights for the Bannock-Shoshone and other tribes when she went home to Idaho’s Fort Hall Reservation land and lived in Nevada.
Instigating 1969’s Alcatraz Island Occupation with SFSU’s Richard Oakes and Native students “turned that whole tide of assimilation” (into white society after 1953’s Termination Act) and became a milestone for Native Americans. She says that after Alcatraz, “People were being proud of who they were as native people” for the first time in a century.
In the meantime and after, she negotiated land rights claims, legal and tribal planning with changing jurisdictions when Federal Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) legislation, actions, policies and cooptation of tribal governments caused Native peoples more stress, poverty and human rights violations.
The Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 had admitted that the U.S. Government had “taken tribal lands illegally,” and that unoccupied land should be ceded back to the Indians, but was only one of many broken promises and cultural misunderstandings further marred by settler overrun, unpaid or unusable compensations and rampant resource extraction and destruction, “encroachment of lands and endangerment of their waters” all the way through Standing Rock, where she demonstrated, raised funds and organized, too.
She stresses her academic and legal work more than her personal life in all this, but started college in 1968, had four children with three husbands (as I did), which takes downplayed dedication, ingenuity and courage, but is actually not all that unusual for women of our generation and independent states of mind. “(T)he Shoshone nation… held their women in higher regard” according to Lewis and Clark Expedition journals, and War Jack stresses the matrilineal gender equity and respect for women and mothers that persisted within tribes well into the 20th Century in spite of displacement, disease and discrimination against tribal and family units.
When she went back to D.C. to fight for litigation to confirm Indian treaty rights to the Island abandoned by the government, she “did not realize that this was all turning into a copy of the White man’s patriarchal system…it was morphing into a warrior society... A warrior society is good but is balanced with other societies in which women hold respect and have a voice.” (p. 172-3) When she told AIM leaders, including her brother-in-law, Russell Means, not to let the tribal leaders bring in guns, she said “Any Indian resistance had to be in a peaceful manner… Remember what happened to the Black Panthers when they took up arms? They Got killed…”
“Without the women being recognized on an equal, bilateral basis, men in control become unbalanced and anything can happen….now the men would not give me the time or respect to hear me out or consider the consequences. This is the patriarchy, where the men are in control and become everything we were fighting and resisting.” (p 196-97) (Tell it like it is, Sister.)
This speaks to me LOUDLY of our need for “intersectionality” in all we do in progressive movements in Berkeley and beyond. On Alcatraz, “we formed an island organization and it was called “Indians of All Tribes,”” because they knew the media, police and agents provocateurs would try to pull them apart the way they attacked tribal council members and chiefs on the reservations with bribes, slander and political favors. (LGBTQ, Black council people and Latinx Mayor re: “anti-racist” empty-condo “recommendations?”)
She backed out of the spotlight and takeover of the BIA office in Washington and AIM at Wounded Knee to work with the Native American Rights Fund to keep trying to enforce the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) and in various legal cases. Fishing rights in Washington State salmon rivers, Alaskan Indigenous land bearing oil and gold; Menominee people, land, reservation and timber rights / ownership and Hopis fighting off the Peabody Coal Company all needed help; as did supporting the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 to “protect Indian culture and tribal integrity from the unnecessary removal of Indian children by state and federal agencies,” development and passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and other legislation.
She is a Big Picture thinker. Sometimes confusing (I wish there was an Index!), but always ringing with the integrity of what she knows, what she feels, what she’s seen and how it all affects thour people, not just her own. She places her own story within the larger context of rapacious European arrivals both awed and terrified by a completely foreign landscape, creatures and inhabitants; fleeing poverty, disease and cultural and religious horrors and persecutions themselves; fueled first by the “Doctrine of Discovery” that claimed Native homelands were “uninhabited,” full of “souls” that needed saving, dreams of what author Malcolm Margolin calls “Utopian Visionaries” and “hatred of the flesh.”
For War Jack, this was followed by “lies, deceit and pure mythology” (p. 141) that brought imperial, militarist hierarchies, weird customs, dreadful diseases and shocking “religious” practices to peoples harmoniously entrenched in thour environments for millennia.
“Native people have tried to promote and communicate an understanding of our natural laws that are connected to all life on Earth, taking only what is needed with prayers and respect.” (p. 19) I reply “Good idea!” as the Inuit man in Never Cry Wolf always said when the biologist said anything obvious, intelligent or outrageous from his “White outsider” scientific viewpoint.
There is courage, persistence, endurance, beauty, spirit and resilience here; but also a whole lot of suffering and pain. What to call the now-unnamed Kroeber Hall or rename the Phoebe Hearst Museum, still holding 8,189 human remains and more than 200,000 “funerary artifacts?” How about Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum West, or Tuol Sleng (Khmer Rouge) Museum of Genocide East? Seriously. Lest we forget…
“The problem is our attitude toward the natural world.” Oren Lyons, Standing on Sacred Ground, “Profit and Loss.”
“If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it.” Nikki Giovanni
Displaying 1 of 1 review