When Pit River People Took Their Land Claim Back to the Land

In the early summer of 1970, a company campground became a place where two accounts of ownership met. Pacific Gas and Electric treated the property as an employee holiday camp. Pit River people who occupied it asserted a prior relationship: this was their homeland. A KPIX report cataloged June 5 preserves the confrontation and attorney Aubrey Grossman's explanation of the claim. In his account, the government's own historical findings supported the people standing on the land.[1]

The occupation made a difficult question immediate. What would it mean to acknowledge that a people's homeland had been taken, yet leave them unable to return to it on their own terms? In a courtroom, that question could become a dispute about statutes and compensation. At a campground, it became a question about who could remain, who could order someone away, and whose presence required permission.

The Pit River Indian Council's proclamation of that year stated a broad purpose. It demanded land from the federal government and major corporations, an accounting of profits, repair of environmental damage, and freedom to sustain Native religious and cultural life. It also called for education that would replace stereotypes with knowledge. Its claim excluded land held by private individuals. The document joined the right to govern with the resources needed to support a community. Land, livelihood, education, and cultural freedom belonged within the same demand.[2]

That breadth matters when we remember the occupations. An arrest photograph can preserve courage and violence while leaving the purpose of the action outside the frame. The proclamation lets us recover some of that purpose. It asks us to imagine what people meant to build, as well as what they meant to challenge. Returning land would create room for a future whose terms they could help determine.

Alcatraz was part of the world in which this struggle unfolded. The sustained occupation of the former prison began in November 1969 under the name Indians of All Tribes. Its participants sought an Indian cultural center, a university, and a museum. Richard Oakes, an Akwesasne Mohawk organizer and San Francisco State student, was one of its most visible figures. His involvement in the Pit River campaign is documented by a June 11, 1970, television report of press conferences with Oakes and Grossman.[3][4]

The connection also ran through friendships. In a later account, participant Dean Chavers recalled spending six months with Oakes at Pit River in 1970. He identified Mickey Gemmill, then tribal chairman, as a fellow San Francisco State student of Oakes. Chavers's recollection describes people bringing their time and organizing experience to an existing community struggle.[5]

This is a more useful account of solidarity than a story in which one famous activist arrives and gives a people their cause. The relationships made cooperation possible; the Pit River claim had its own history, leaders, and purposes. Alcatraz and Pit River also involved different places and demands. An intertribal occupation of a former federal prison and the effort of a people to regain their ancestral homeland could strengthen one another without becoming interchangeable.

By early October, a Quonset hut stood at Four Corners, near the junction of Highways 299 and 89 east of Burney. The camp brought the claim into a conspicuous place in Pit River country. A contemporary newspaper report identified Gemmill as a leader of both the earlier PG&E occupation and this new action. It reported his willingness to submit to arrest without resistance so the claim might reach federal court.[6]

On October 27, officers moved against the encampment. The eviction became violent. People were injured, arrests followed, and the hut was removed. Contemporary reporting and the Tribe's later account differ about the numbers arrested and hospitalized. Both preserve the central fact of a land demonstration met by a substantial law-enforcement operation. In congressional testimony in 2025, Chairman Yatch Bamford recalled that the occupants had requested peaceful arrest for trespass; the charges brought instead included offenses involving officers and timber.[6][7]

The records deserve careful reading. The contemporary press repeated allegations about tree cutting and described fighting, while acknowledging uncertainty about who struck first. Bamford's testimony emphasizes the peaceful purpose of the occupation and the violence of the eviction. Charges are allegations, and neither the selection of charges nor the fact of an arrest establishes a person's guilt. Nor do these records establish that officials avoided trespass charges because they feared losing ownership of the land. That explanation goes beyond what the evidence shows.

There is a related distinction between seeking a test of title and securing one on favorable terms. Participants could try to bring ownership before a court, but the result would still depend on the court's rules and its interpretation of federal law. The later decision in United States v. Gemmill makes that difficulty plain. It concerned actions in 1972 and 1973, rather than the October 1970 raid. In 1976, the Ninth Circuit rejected the aboriginal-title defense and upheld timber-theft convictions. It nevertheless reversed the trespass convictions because the Forest Supervisor had exceeded his authority in closing the areas concerned.[8]

That mixed result should remain visible. A successful challenge to an official's conduct did not produce a judicial return of the homeland. Equally, the court's treatment of title did not settle what justice required of the institutions that benefited from dispossession. Those are different judgments, and an honest account needs space for both.

The solidarity continued after the raid. In March 1971, KPIX covered Pit River representatives and Alcatraz occupants publicizing their claims in San Francisco at PG&E and Southern Pacific. The archive identifies Ross Montgomery Sr. among those interviewed. His remarks questioned the power corporations exercised in a country that described its authority as belonging to the people.[9]

Remembering these events means keeping their participants' purposes in view. The names most readily found in newspapers are only a beginning. A fuller community history also needs the people who supplied meals, provided rides, raised defense money, cared for children, and carried news home. Those roles should be recovered through records and willing testimony, rather than filled with imagined scenes. Families should have room to tell what the occupations cost them and what they made possible.

In his 2025 testimony, Bamford described the Tribe's effort to regain Four Corners and create an interpretive center there. That proposal gives memory a practical form: a place where the events can be taught within the homeland that gave them meaning.[7] The people who gathered in 1970 had demanded the ability to shape a future on their land. Preserving their story begins by taking that demand seriously.

Sources and notes

[1]San Francisco State University's Bay Area Television Archive, “Pit River Indians claim and PG&E,” KPIX, cataloged June 5, 1970, film KPIX 102261. The Tribe also preserves this report on its Madesi history page. These are copies of one report, not independent witnesses. “Early summer” avoids imposing a single day on the opening sequence, which later sources date differently. ↩

[2]Pit River Indian Council, Mickey Gemmill, chairman, “Proclamation to the President and the People of the United States,” reproduced in Resurgence 3, no. 4 (November–December 1970), p. 11, contemporary scanned issue. The proclamation is evidence of the Council's stated program; its legal assertions and claim of unanimity are not adopted here as independent findings. The magazine's separate caption contains historical errors and is not relied upon. ↩

[3]National Park Service, Troy Johnson, “We Hold the Rock”, for the Alcatraz occupation's opening and proposed institutions. See also KRON footage of Oakes reading a proclamation, November 9, 1969. ↩

[4]Bay Area Television Archive, “Press Conferences with Richard Oakes and Aubrey Grossman,” June 11, 1970, film KRON 2403-6. ↩

[5]Dean Chavers, “Alcatraz Is Not an Island,” World Literature Today, Autumn 2019. This is a participant's retrospective account; the contemporary June 11 film independently documents Oakes's involvement. ↩

[6]“Indians Told to Leave U.S. Land” and “Shasta Dispute—Indians, Deputies in Battle,” San Francisco Chronicle clippings reproduced in the Congressional Record, December 2, 1970, pp. 39593–39594. The first is dated October 27. The raid report counts 24 arrests and one hospitalization. It dates the camp to October 5, whereas the Tribe's 2025 testimony dates the hut to October 4. The body therefore uses “early October.” ↩

[7]Yatch Bamford, chairman of the Pit River Tribe, testimony before the House Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, April 30, 2025, pp. 3–4. This account reports 26 arrests and four hospital admissions. References to the transfer and interpretive center describe the proposal presented in 2025, not a finding that a transfer has occurred. ↩

[8]United States v. Gemmill, 535 F.2d 1145 (9th Cir. 1976), parts I and III. ↩

[9]Bay Area Television Archive, “Pit River & Alcatraz American Indian meetings in San Francisco,” KPIX, March 25, 1971, film KPIX 104736. The archive's description identifies Ross Montgomery Sr.; no new identification has been made from an image. ↩