With its charismatic leader George Custer and its memorable encounters with Plains Indians, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Seventh Cavalry serves as the iconic regiment in the post–Civil War U.S Army. Voluminous written documentation as well as archaeological and osteological research suggest that the soldiers of the Seventh represented a cross section of the men who joined the army as a whole at the time. In Health of the Seventh Cavalry, editors P. Willey and Douglas D. Scott and their co-contributors—experts in history, medicine, human biology, epidemiology, and human osteology—examine the Seventh’s medical records to determine the health of the nineteenth-century U.S. Army, and the prevalence and treatment of the numerous conditions that plagued soldiers during the Indian Wars. Building on previous comparisons of archaeological evidence and medical records, Willey and Scott follow multiple lines of inquiry to assess the health of the Seventh, from its organization in 1866 to its 1884 station on the Northern Great Plains. Pairing general overviews of nineteenth- and twentieth-century health care with essays on malaria, injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other specific ailments, Health of the Seventh Cavalry provides fresh insights into the health, disease, and trauma that the regiment experienced over two decades. More than 100 tables, graphs, and maps track the troops’ illnesses and diseases by month, season, year, and location, as well as their stress periods, desertions, and deaths. A glossary of medical terms rounds out the volume. As an ideal exemplar of regiments of its time, the Seventh Cavalry affords scholars and enthusiasts a better understanding of nineteenth-century health and medicine. This volume reveals the struggles that the post–Civil War Seventh, and the entire U.S. Army, faced on the battlefield and elsewhere.

HEART OF THE ROCK
THE INDIAN INVASION OF ALCATRAZ
By Adam Fortunate Eagle
Photography by Vincent Maggiore, Brooks Townes, and Ilka Hartmann

University of Oklahoma Press

Copyright © 2002 University of Oklahoma Press.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8061-3396-1

Chapter One

Turtle Island

I guess I am an old man now. At least these seventy-two years on my body would say I must be old. Even so, it seems to me that I will ride the back of this turtle for at least a few more years before I really feel like a senior citizen. It's an Ojibwa legend that the earth is a Turtle Island on a great lake. I like that, and I like it that younger people of my tribe today insist on the old term, "Ojibwa," instead of the anglicized "Chippewa" I used to call myself.

    Turtle Island is one of those creation stories that anthropologists and missionaries love to compare among tribes, as if there is some hidden secret in them that binds together all people from the beginning of time. Maybe they are on to something.

    In our case it was a great flood, a rising of the waters, that left all creatures adrift together on a log raft. A "Water World" that was better than the movies. Everywhere was water, along every horizon, without even so much as a mountain peak rising above it. The creatures became desperate in their search for land, and each of them tried in their own way to find it. Eagle soared up on the wind currents and looked far beyond where others could see, but there was nothing to be seen except water. Loon said he would find it beneath the surface where it had always been before. But even with the deep breath he took before diving in like an arrow, Loon could not see any bottom at all.

    It was Muskrat who volunteered next. He could stay under much longer than Loon and swim as deep as to where it might be. The other creatures waited and waited. It was much too long even for Muskrat to be under the water, and they all feared that he must have drowned. Just then he popped back up to the surface and slowly rolled over on his back. They could see that Muskrat had made a valiant try, but it was too much for him. Together the other creatures brought poor Muskrat's body on to the raft and began to mourn for him. But Rabbit noticed that Muskrat's tiny fists were clenched on his stomach and that they were holding something. It was earth! Strong good soil that Muskrat must have found in a place too deep even for him.

    "Put it on my back," said Turtle, "and we will grow from it." And so the earth began again on the back of Turtle Island.

    My youngest daughter, Asha, listened through most of this story until she saw her little niece, Mishon, coming in from playing.

    "I've got to go to the kitchen for a minute, Dad," she said. "Mishon, you listen to Grandpa. He's telling a story."

    That's what you get when you're my age. Surrogate listeners.

    There's even one member of my family who teases me all the time about telling "more damn Indian stories." I tell them anyway, just as our people have always done. It's a grandpa's privilege. That doesn't make me old, even if it does help establish me as an elder. I still work for hours every day in my shop, sculpting the artwork that pays our way. Other times, when my wife, Bobbie, and I are not traveling to some show or speaking engagement, I build on the earth lodge I am constructing from old tires and wooden beams the size of telephone poles. What "old" man still does that?

    Now and then I look at one of those pictures of me from the past, me with my barbershop haircut, and even one when I'm wearing a tie and a suit. "Handsome dude," I think, "looks sort of like some movie star or politician." But was that really me? My braids have been twisted in gray and silver for many years now. I'm not certain I even have that one suit anymore, let alone have any use for it. It served its purpose, but the picture doesn't tell the story.

    Bobbie and I have eleven grandchildren now, and just recently had our first great-grandchild. Our oldest grandchild, Asha's daughter, is nearly thirty and very successful where she lives in Seattle. We were so proud to give her her name when she was born: Benayshe-ba-equay, which is a combining of both our native languages—"benayshe" in Chippewa for bird, "ba" in Shoshone for water, and "equay" in Chippewa again for woman. Bird of the water woman.

    Everyone calls her "Benay," and I'm not sure if she is still too shy about it to explain when people ask what it means. What it really refers to is the graceful, soaring flight of a bird that can carry away the imagination. A bird like the pelican, which in Spanish is "alcatraz."

    It has been all that time of Benay's young life since Alcatraz so firmly held my full attention. At the time I wasn't much older than she is now, and as I remember it, there were so many others much younger than myself. Sometimes it seems to me that you don't really get older at all, you just find an age that suits you best and live with that. I was at about that age in 1969. That point in time seems to me like a center from which I can measure all fore and since. A place of laughter and great courage, and a place of suffering and foolish mistakes.

    At the time, anthropologist Margaret Mead called the Alcatraz occupation "a magnificent piece of dramatization." Lehman Brightman, a Native American Studies instructor at Berkeley who was never particularly fond of me, called it "the most important event since we actually stopped warfare with white men in 1889." But that was before either of them, or I, could see how really important and meaningful it was.

    I will now take you with me on the journey that is always a circle. It's a journey of Turtle Island.

Chapter Two

"If You Want It"

It seems to me that almost every time we invaded Alcatraz, some federal official was there to greet us with a memorable one-liner.

    The first time, it was a befuddled-looking man who roared up to the dock in a pickup truck and identified himself as A. L. Aylworth, acting warden. In firmly polite terms he advised us that we were trespassing on federal property and should leave.

    At that the attorney representing the American Indian Council, Elliott Leighton, popped open his briefcase and began reading from a sheaf of papers explaining the basis of Sioux claims to surplus federal property under terms of the 1868 Black Hills Treaty.

    Aylworth listened, then scratched his head for a tense couple of seconds.

    "Well," he said finally, "I guess if you want it, you can have it."

    That was on a Sunday afternoon, March 8, 1964, barely a year after the last federal prisoner had been taken off the island. His name was Frank Weatherman, and he was reported to have said, as he turned his head and glared back on "the Rock" for the last time, "This place ain't never been no good for nobody."

    Aylworth must have thought something of the same thing as he surveyed the crowd of some forty Indians, many in full regalia, and their lawyer, all standing before him.

    Who in their right mind would actually want the place? Especially among an unbelievable assortment of actual Indians who looked as if they had just stepped out of some ephemeral costume documentary? I was a bit player in that day's affair, there with most of the others and a select batch of media to watch and lend support to the action of five Dakota Sioux led by Allen Cottier in staking a serious claim of their own to property the U.S. government publicly said they could find no use for.

    Cottier, known among us as "Chalk," and to others by his Sioux name, "Whistler," was the most popular leader among the loosely organized Sioux Club in the Bay Area at the time, and thus our official spokesman. But history should record that it was really the inspiration and dogged determination of Richard McKenzie which led to that first "invasion." It's McKenzie, a Sioux from Rosebud, South Dakota, who should be remembered, if not as the ultimate "father" of Indian Alcatraz, then certainly as the grumpy uncle of its motivation.

    Like many in the strong warrior tradition of his tribe, Dick McKenzie was a large, imposing man. He was a welder by trade, given sometimes to intimidating others as a way of making himself heard. If you argued with Dick at all, it was always best to be sure you had somebody else on your side. His threats were not so much physical, although he was capable of that. Disagreement with Dick could result in a numbing glare of derision and contempt from the Sioux leader, a look that was meant to leave his adversary feeling shunned and alone. He and I were never good friends and, later, it would come down to just such a contest of wills between us over the direction that should be taken by the United Bay Area Council of American Indians. But there is no doubt that it was McKenzie's strong presence and his personal convictions about his own tribe's treaty rights that brought the attention of us all to Alcatraz. The Sioux Club had discussed Alcatraz among themselves for weeks after the Kennedy administration first announced in 1963 that some new use would be sought for the grim icon of repression that it had become.

    There is no doubt that long before San Francisco attorney Leighton was consulted for advice, and even before any of the rest of us were included for moral support, the key ideas for an occupation were formed in living room and kitchen meetings of the Sioux Club. Partly for reasons presented by the Black Hills Treaty itself, perhaps the most important Indians in that process were never given the recognition they deserve. They included Cottier's wife, Belva, along with another Dakota woman, Stella Leach, and Joan Boardman, a white woman who provided some early research, all of whom were essential to the planning. Still, it was McKenzie who seemed to forge them together, almost as if he had welded them himself from the intense smelter of his personal fire.

    The 1868 treaty with the Sioux and the Arapaho aligned with Red Cloud failed to prevent intrusion into the Black Hills by white squatters and gold prospectors and led, indirectly, to the defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876. But the treaty also contained elements describing rights for Red Cloud's people that remain in dispute today.

Excerpted from HEART OF THE ROCK by Adam Fortunate Eagle. Copyright © 2002 by University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.