Before sunrise on Monday, Oct. 12, the ferries left Pier 33 in the dark. By the time the sun came up over the East Bay hills, more than 2,000 people stood around a ceremonial fire on Alcatraz for the 47th annual Indigenous Peoples Day Sunrise Gathering.
The International Indian Treaty Council, which hosts the gathering with its affiliate Indigenous Justice, described the island in its announcement as “Yelamu, the ancestral lands of the Ohlone.” It is a fitting description. As CalMatters and ICT reported in their coverage of the event, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, “whose homelands encompass much of what is now the Bay Area,” continues to seek federal recognition. (The report misspelled the Tribe’s name. Its point stands.)
“A fight against erasure”
Lead organizer and emcee Morning Star Gali, a Pit River citizen who directs Indigenous Justice, framed the morning around visibility. “It’s more important now than ever to be here and to be present,” she told CalMatters/ICT. “Every day as a California Indian woman is a fight against erasure and a fight against invisibility.”
Erasure is a word the Muwekma Ohlone know well. On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the Tribe posted a video message saying the day is “a time to honour the people who came before us, recognise the communities carrying their cultures forward, and celebrate the generations shaping what comes next. For the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, our story is not confined to history.”
The gathering marks the 1969–1971 occupation of Alcatraz by Indians of All Tribes. The occupation began shortly after a fire destroyed the American Indian Cultural Center of San Francisco. Mohawk activist Richard Oakes led the occupiers in claiming the island as “Indian Land.” For 19 months they ran a school, a radio station and a clinic, until federal agents removed the last occupants on June 11, 1971. Gali called the occupation “the spark that lit the fire” of the modern Native rights movement.
Speakers also remembered the island’s earlier Native prisoners. Matonth Brown, who is Elem Pomo and San Carlos Apache, spoke as a descendant of the 19 Hopi men imprisoned on Alcatraz in 1895 for resisting the removal of their children to federal boarding schools. The IITC’s announcement also remembered Modoc warriors held there in 1873, and a man recorded as “Paiute Tom,” who died on the island that year.
Two governments, two grievances
This year’s gathering had targets in both Sacramento and Washington.
About two weeks before Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed AB 1881, which would have strengthened protections for sacred sites and tribal religious practice. Indigenous Justice sponsored the bill. He also vetoed AB 2218 on tribal water and SB 891, which would have created a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons justice program at the state Department of Justice. The IITC called the vetoes a “shocking action” and pointed out that Newsom had formally apologized to California Indians in 2019.
“I’ve gone into state parks with all of our relatives to go in to be able to gather medicine and to be able to pray, to be able to pray at the sacred waters — I’ve been kicked out of those spaces,” Gali said. In response to CalMatters/ICT, California State Parks said it “is not aware of any such incidents in recent years.”
San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder, a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes and the first Native American woman on the Board of Supervisors, spoke about water. “We know water is life,” she said. “It must be protected.”
Washington’s threat sits on the island itself. CalMatters/ICT reported that President Trump, who has repeatedly vowed to reopen the federal penitentiary, requested $152 million for it in his fiscal 2027 budget in April. Congress has not finalized that budget. The IITC listed “threats by the U.S. government to re-establish a federal prison on Alcatraz” first among the challenges facing this year’s gathering.
“It’s a scary world we live in — scary president,” Irvin Whekins, a Shawnee youth counselor who brought nine Native young people from Chico, told the reporters. “He’s still trying to get rid of us.”
Sixty-two tribes, and the first people of the Bay
CalMatters/ICT noted that 62 California tribes lack federal recognition. That status would bring, among other things, stronger protections for sacred sites. When state protections are vetoed, unrecognized tribes are left with almost nothing.
No tribe embodies that gap more than the Muwekma Ohlone. The Tribe’s ancestors lived around this Bay for thousands of years. Their descendants were once recognized by the United States as the Verona Band, then dropped from federal attention after 1927 without any act of Congress. Today the Tribe watches others gather on its homeland to protest erasure.
The Bay Area marked the holiday in other Ohlone spaces too. In Oakland’s Fruitvale, Peralta Hacienda Historical Park opened “Indigenous Voices,” a permanent park-wide exhibition on Ohlone history and presence, on Oct. 10.
The next Sunrise Gathering on Alcatraz is on Thanksgiving morning. The Muwekma Times hopes that by then, whoever speaks from that island will be able to say the federal government has finally recognized the people whose land it is.
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