We regret that John Trudell, our previously announced guest for the evening, will be unable to attend.

When John Trudell arrived on Alcatraz Island in 1969, the occupation by Indians of All Tribes (IAT) was underway, but this brash twenty-three-year-old Isani Sioux activist soon came to be “The Voice of Alcatraz.” His daily radio broadcasts from the island siege were articulate, confrontational, and above all stirring. After the nineteen-month occupation ended, Trudell went on to become a national spokesman of the American Indian Movement, earning a reputation as one of the most volatile political “subversives” of the 1970s. During those incendiary days, Trudell was there: at the 1972 occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, and the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation. Trudell's FBI dossier exceeded 17,000 pages, one of the longest in the bureau's history. "He's extremely eloquent," an FBI memo read, "therefore extremely dangerous." This eloquence would be both his downfall and his rising up. Native American producer/director Heather Rae (Frozen River) spent ten years gathering source footage, amassing interviews with many Trudell admirers, and making sense of this cantankerous and committed man's life. When an arson fire killed his wife and three children on a Nevada reservation in 1979, Trudell stepped away from his confrontational politics and re-emerged as a poet and spoken-word performer. But his crusade for Native People's rights did not stop there-it was now embedded in his language-based art, performed with exuberant passion, which ironically gave him access to a new generation of Native Americans. Rae's worshipful portrait brings together many of Trudell's latter-day friends and fellow activists, such as Robert Redford, Jackson Browne, and Kris Kristofferson. Beyond the adoration, you can witness the sacrifice and courage of an activist who has walked the longest walk.