So there’s just this one thing I wanted to tell you about Alcatraz, which I learned on my tour of the island.
In 1969, after the facilities had been closed as a federal penitentiary, a group of Native Americans decided to take a stand and attempt to live the island, in protest against the land taken from them by the government. They claimed rights under an old treaty allowing them to occupy abandoned federal property.
Alcatraz Island is not a very friendly place to live. All of the occupants later left the island, but the standoff brought a lot of attention to relations between Native Americans and the US government.
