Alcatraz Island

That island sitting out there in the bay — it looks bleak, right? Cold concrete, guard towers, razor wire. But here's something that catches everyone off guard. The prisoners on Alcatraz tended elaborate gardens. Roses, irises, greenhouses full of flowers. Some of those rose bushes are still alive today, decades after the last inmate left. Turns out that when you're locked on a rock in the middle of the bay, gardening becomes the ultimate privilege. Wardens used it as a reward for good behavior, and inmates threw themselves into it.

But the island's history as a prison goes back way further than Al Capone. The very first prisoners held on Alcatraz were Indigenous Californians, locked up during the Civil War era. And in eighteen ninety-five, nineteen Hopi men from Arizona were imprisoned here for the crime of — and this is real — refusing to send their children to government-run boarding schools that were designed to strip away their culture. They were held for nearly a year. So Alcatraz was always about control, long before it became a federal penitentiary.

And then, in nineteen sixty-nine, the island came full circle. Eighty-nine Native Americans, mostly college students, occupied Alcatraz and claimed it under an eighteen-sixty-eight Sioux treaty that said abandoned federal land reverted to Native peoples. They stayed for nineteen months. They ran a school, a health clinic, and even a radio station called Radio Free Alcatraz that broadcast across the Bay Area. The occupation didn't win them the island, but it changed federal Indian policy forever. President Nixon reversed the termination era policies partly because of what happened right out there. The graffiti from that occupation — "Indian Land" — you can still see it painted on the old water tower when you visit.