LIKE A HURRICANE
American Indian Activism from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee

By Diane Manuel

e was only 9 years old at the time of the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee by the Oglala Sioux, but Robert Warrior will never forget the prime-time event that brought international attention to the concerns of American Indians.

“The thing I remember most clearly was Marlon Brando refusing the Academy Award,” says the assistant professor of English. “In his place Sacheen Littlefeather tried to make a speech ­ and got booed off the stage.”

Warrior revisits the activism that swept Indian country from 1969 to 1973 in the recently published Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press). Warrior, a member of the Osage nation, co-wrote the book with Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche who writes and lectures on Indian art and politics.

“People who’ve read it say to me, ‘I thought it was going to be a heavy book about injustice,’” Warrior says. “Instead, we tried to tell a story that would be a biography of a period, from the revolutionary euphoria that surrounded Alcatraz to the sense of sobering reality that followed Wounded Knee.”

The narrative is focused on three events: the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz by 78 young Indians, which began in November 1969 as an attempt to reclaim “surplus federal land” granted to Indians under the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868; the unplanned occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in 1972 that was launched

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