Native people are America’s most visible invisible minority. We occupy a lot of America’s head space — a fundamental part of the country’s self-regard and the stories it tells about itself — but most Americans will go their entire lives without having any kind of prolonged, sustained contact with us in person. Native people are met as myth in the mind or not at all.

One of the most durable myths that shapes the thinking about us is that we began living lives of untrammeled freedom and complete autonomy in the Nearctic garden and we fundamentally ended as people when the frontier was closed — that North America begins with Indians and America truly begins once we’re gone.

This thinking was best expressed on the first page of Dee Brown ’s 1 970 best seller, “ Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee .” He writes that the latter half of the 19th century was “an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.”

On the other side of that flat fantasy are the myths that arose after Alcatraz and, subsequently, the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington in 1972 and the more prolonged and violent takeover of Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973 .

Those myths stand in counterpoint and contrast to the earlier ones of our demise and largely center on the leaders of Native resistance. In these new myths, people like Dennis Banks and Russell Means and Clyde Bellecourt emerge as freedom fighters who selflessly gave themselves to the struggle for Indian people and won. If Chief Joseph was captured, Dennis Banks never was (he did, however, turn himself in). If Sitting Bull quit the fight and toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Russell Means never did (though he was the voice for Pocahontas’s father in the Disney cartoon of her life). Neither the premature stories of our collective death nor the tales of the selfless heroism are totally true. But suspended between those two narratives is Alcatraz.