“Although we didn’t get the island back, we won. Acknowledgment and recognition.”

In November 1969, after the federal Relocation Act sent 60,000 young Native people from reservations into six American cities, a group of college students and Indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz Island. They stayed for 19 months. They built a school. They ran Radio Free Alcatraz with John Trudell. They lived by candlelight, drove without headlights, and brought the consciousness of Native people to the front of the American conversation.

This story sits down with one of the original occupiers to share how the occupation shifted what was possible at the federal level, and how the movement that started on a former prison island still resonates through every modern effort for Tribal sovereignty, including Secretary Deb Haaland’s recent return to the island on its 52nd anniversary.