Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, November 1894, US troops came to the village of Arrivi in Northeastern Arizona and arrested

19 Hopi men.

They took them first to Fort Defiance and then on to a prison on the island of

Alcatraz, a rocky outpost in the San Francisco Bay. This was the culmination of sorts of

a year or more of resistance by this Hopi Indian community,

resistance to attempts to quote unquote Americanize them by the US government.

The centerpiece of this story was the schooling of Hopi children, but of course part of this program was also seizing of land and resources.

We'll get into this, but the Hopi resisted in a really interesting and often very successful ways, at least for a few years in the mid

1890s but then we do get to this moment 19 men arrested taken to Alcatraz

where they spent nearly a year. Let's get into the conversation but I just want to read a little bit from a San Francisco newspaper reflecting

how this story was reported on, at least in the White Press, writing of the prisoners the San Francisco

call newspaper said quote they have not

hardship aside from the fact that they have been rudely snatched from the bosom of their

families so that's a real other than that Mrs Lincoln, how was that play?

How rude?

And it goes on to say, they are prisoners and prisoners

they shall stay until they have learned to appreciate

the advantage of education, presumably their Western Americanized education.

But let's talk about the Hopi prisoners on Alka-Chras Island in 1894.

Here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

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