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The Miccosukee Tribe is embarking on a campaign to buy and protect lands in the Florida Everglades.
The Guardian reports that it is in a partnership with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation.
The goal is to create a safe habitat for threatened species including black bears, panthers, and Key deer.
The initiative was spurred by the Trump administration’s slashing of federal funds for conservation projects.
Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee, said the tribe has a constitutional duty to conserve their traditional homelands, the lands, and waters which have protected and fed the tribe “since time immemorial”.
The agreement was announced at a summit of corridor stakeholders in Orlando recently, after a study by the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society found that 60% of federally recognized tribes have lost grants or other federal funds exceeding $56 million since President Donald Trump began his second term in January.
The Hopi Nineteen were sent to Alcatraz Island for seditious conduct on Jan. 3, 1895. (Courtesy Mennonite Library and Archives / Bethel College)
Alcatraz Island has been glamorized for decades on Hollywood’s silver screen, most notably by the 1979 blockbuster “Escape from Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood.
The film depicts an iconic real-life prison break by inmates Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin a year before it closed in 1963.
But as KJZZ’s Gabriel Pietrorazio reports in the conclusion of his two-part series about the Hopi Nineteen and The Rock, the real-life history also features a number of dramatic stories.
Wendy Holliday is a former archivist for the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office.
“I think a lot of people know Alcatraz. They kind of know the stories from the movies when it was a federal prison and then don’t really know it’s related to Indigenous people. When I was doing the research and I lived on the reservation and I was a tribal employee, 100 years after those men were imprisoned at Alcatraz, this story was still so resonant as though it had just happened yesterday.”
Built in 1854, Alcatraz Island became home to the first lighthouse on the West Coast. (Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration)
As much as Alcatraz is about uncommon criminals, it’s also associated with boarding schools.
“Some of the stories that people would tell me that they had heard kinda passed down, was just about the trauma for them and for their family members that were left behind, wondering what happened.”
And once she started, Holliday couldn’t stop telling that side of the story.
“It’s not just that they were imprisoned, but they were taken from their ancestral land that was absolutely vital to their spiritual practice and wellbeing. It was a story, still very much alive and I still think today.”
Amber-Rose Howard is with Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), a coalition of more than 80 groups organizing against prisons across the Golden State.
“Of course, Alcatraz is just a non-starter. There’s no drinking water, no utilities, no infrastructure. It’s hard to tell what’s a real threat and what’s just fear mongering, but at this time, I think that we should be taking everything he’s saying seriously.”
If not Alcatraz, Howard says undocumented people are likely next to be sent somewhere else – empty prisons that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been eyeing – even in Blythe, Calif. along the Arizona border.
“But I don’t think it stops there. It starts with folks who are undocumented, and then it will continue to spill over into disappearing people from underserved, marginalized communities, who are Black, who are Brown, who are Indigenous, who don’t fit the agenda.”
Listen to Part One of the Series
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