This clip of Richard Oakes addressing the media as the representative of those participating in the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 is one of the most entertaining press releases I have ever seen. Oakes is certainly defying stereotypes of pacification by presenting his pointedly ironic statement to the white press. The rhetorical framing of the Native American “outbreak [as being] more rebellion than war,” allows only a weak portrayal of resistance and a feeling of inevitable failure (Deloria, 28). Oakes does not fall into this trap. By turning white men’s common phrases and notions such as manifest destiny, beacon of freedom, and discovery to speak of a certain inevitability of Native American victory, Oakes turns the white colonizers’ words directly against them. This not only changes the narrative from one of outbreak to one of strong and deliberate resistance, but does so in a clever way that calls attention to the hypocrisy of the US government and European American culture. Thus, he works against both “the most powerful expectations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—violence and Indian disappearance—and those of the twentieth, which [clustered] around various forms of primitivism” (Deloria, 50).

This speech, though presented as a serious press release, seems more like a stand up comedy routine, complete with many of the elements common to Native American comedians to this day. Oakes definitely makes a persuasive claim to “Native peoples’ inherent right to survival and sovereignty” while also relying on self-deprecation and teasing the audience through flipping assumptions and making use of historically white notions to show that they actually make more sense when connected with the Native American struggle (Morris, 38). Again, Oakes’s use of comedy reminds us of the important role that comedy can play in social mediation (Mintz, 75).