Converting the rock

By: Sarah Phelan

Native American spiritual leader Marshall "Golden Eagle" Jack admits he was just a kid in 1969 when a group of American Indians occupied Alcatraz Island. They claimed that the island's reclassification as surplus property following the 1963 closure of Alcatraz Prison entitled them to take possession of the iconic island.

But Jack says he knows enough people from the American Indian Movement, which began advocating for urban Indians in the late '60s, to understand that "the people standing up for their rights back then didn't have enough clout in the legal system" to keep the island and build an American Indian cultural center on its craggy slopes.

Instead, the island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is operated by the National Park Service. Today it attracts 1.

5 million visitors per year, the GGNRA's chief of public affairs, Rich Weideman, says. But having a brutal former prison as one of San Francisco's top tourist attractions is unsettling to some.

So Jack and AIM founder Dennis Banks, Chief Avrol Looking Horse, Laynee Bluebird Woman, and Rose Mary Cambra of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe have sponsored Proposition C, a nonbinding declaration on the February 2008 ballot that would make it city policy to explore acquiring Alcatraz Island and setting up a global peace center in place of the prison.

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