The Longest Walk, 1978: Walking from Alcatraz to Washington for Native Survival

From the National Park Service series "The Struggle for Sovereignty: American Indian Activism in the Nation's Capital, 1968–1978". Words of the activists quoted in the source are paraphrased here.

On February 11, 1978, more than 300 Native Americans gathered on Alcatraz Island. A peace pipe passed through the crowd while a medicine man spoke and others drummed. The ceremony began a five-month pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. — the fourth by Native activists in ten years. In the Longest Walk, twenty-four Indians planned to walk the whole way from California to the capital, joined by supporters along the route, and then hold eight days of demonstrations, protests, religious ceremonies and workshops.

What it was about

The walk was both spiritual and political. On top of the general call for sovereignty behind earlier demonstrations, it protested eleven bills then before Congress that would violate treaty rights, especially to Indian land, fishing and minerals. It was also a chance to teach non-Indians about Indian cultural and spiritual life.

A changed movement

By 1978 the pilgrimage to Washington was an established way for Native activists to press for changes in federal Indian policy, but much had changed since Native activists joined the Poor People's Campaign in 1968.

• Policy: years of activism had ended the destructive federal policy of termination, and some steps had been taken to begin repairing past damage.
• Message: in 1968 activists had struggled to distinguish their fight for sovereignty from the more familiar Civil Rights movement. By 1978 they had a clear message — colonialism was the problem and sovereignty the solution — that both explained sovereignty to the public and mobilised Native people across the country.
• Reach: activists increasingly saw themselves in a common struggle with colonised peoples worldwide. In 1974 AIM called for the International Indian Treaty Council, an organisation of Indigenous peoples of North, Central and South America, which the United Nations recognised the year before the walk.

Yet as activists pressed their treaty rights, they provoked a backlash from state governments and private interests seeking to develop Indian land and resources. The proposed Native American Equal Opportunity Act would have revoked every treaty between the United States and any tribe; other bills would have opened Native lands to oil and mineral extraction and stripped nations of hard-won hunting, fishing, land and water rights.

The road to Washington

After Alcatraz the walkers set out from Sacramento, where organiser Dennis Banks — a founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 and an organiser of the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties — told a rally of several hundred that they were being forced to walk for survival.

The walk drew little notice until Minneapolis, where the marchers built a sweat lodge and held ceremonies at Fort Snelling State Park. Students from the Heart of the Earth Survival School, founded by AIM in 1972, joined them for a "Run for Survival", running the 560 miles to Lawrence, Kansas, in shifts with cars alongside. Clyde Bellecourt, another veteran of the Trail of Broken Treaties, began contacting tribal councils along the route, and supporters joined in large numbers. The walkers addressed state legislatures along the way; Bellecourt later recalled entering with a drum and ceremonial songs, then urging support for the Indian religious freedom bill moving through Congress and opposition to the bills that would abrogate treaties.

Arrival

On July 15, 1978, the original 24 walkers entered Washington with some 2,000 supporters, marching to a drumbeat under police escort down Georgia and Arkansas avenues and 16th Street NW to Meridian Hill (Malcolm X) Park, where a crowd of Black, white and Indian supporters had grown to 3,000. Organiser Bill Means welcomed them to Indian country. Comedian Dick Gregory and actor Marlon Brando, long-time supporters of Indian sovereignty, joined them, and Bellecourt warned that multinational corporations wanted the uranium, coal and lignite under Indian land — a theft, he said, no different from the taking of farmland and timber 150 years earlier.

• Camps: an estimated 2,800 people camped at Greenbelt Park in Prince George's County, about twelve miles from downtown, and came into the city each day. Some 200 to 300 religious leaders kept a four-day vigil at a spiritual camp in West Potomac Park near the Lincoln Memorial — the former site of Resurrection City — its tipis a striking sight on the National Mall.
• Protests: rallies, marches and ceremonies at Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and the FBI building.
• Close: a powwow on the Ellipse behind the White House on July 22. Congress and the administration had been cool, but many participants felt they had reached and educated millions of people.

What followed

Days after the walkers arrived, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and a few months later the Indian Child Welfare Act — both critical protections of Native rights. Of the eleven bills the walkers had come to oppose, not one passed.

A tale of two marches

The government's response was very different from 1972, when it refused to meet the Trail of Broken Treaties and the standoff escalated into the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1978 the National Park Service cleared the way for the Greenbelt Park camp and quickly approved the vigil site, and the National Guard set up a mess tent, portable showers and toilets, army tents and a clinic. Much of the difference came from the work AIM and other activists had done across the country to raise awareness and address problems in Indian communities: six years later, they marched into a Washington ready to begin acknowledging the wrongs of the past.

Sources

• National Park Service, "The Longest Walk, 1978", in The Struggle for Sovereignty: American Indian Activism in the Nation's Capital, 1968–1978. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/longest-walk.htm
• The article draws on Clyde Bellecourt's autobiography The Thunder Before the Storm (2016) and 1978 reporting in the Hartford Courant, Shreveport Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
• The source's photograph, from the D.C. Public Library's Washington Star Collection, is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.