From this week’s topics I was most interested in the occupation of Alcatraz as I had been familiar with Alcatraz the prison and one of its famous escape attempts, but I had never heard of its occupation by Native American activists once let alone the two times it happened. I was also really excited to see a topic that is directly tied into our class reading, There There. I thought this incidence was particularly good for highlighting the hypocrisy of the U.S. government and how they consistently failed to uphold the treaties that they entered and almost always set the terms in their favor in the first place. The PowerPoint from November 4th had explained about the first occupation that the occupiers had used the Fort Laramie treaty as justification as “1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that stated deserted federal land could return to the Lakota.” My reaction to that initially was surprise that after the first, shorter occupation the government didn’t either retrospectively rewrite the treaty to discourage a repeat of the occupation or that they didn’t cede control over this land that they were no longer using anyway to placate protesters for the moment. I strongly believe that these treaties simply just should have been honored but I am just surprised the government hadn’t done anything bigger to try to walk this one back between 1964 and 1969. I think the second occupation made good headway for Native voices to be heard though I’m sure they could have managed to gain even more ground had the event not ended so tragically for the leaders. One thing I would be interested in looking into in regards to Alcatraz is seeing if there are any other written sources like a diary for example that would give us a glimpse into their day-to-day at Alcatraz. I thought the documents of the rules were very interesting and gave insight into this but I will have to look into any firsthand accounts that may be available.