Born: 1 January 1954, United States
Died: 4 December 2022
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Earth Feather, Alida Victoria Quiroz-Montiel
The following is republished from the Library of Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Alida Montiel awakened to the power of social protest—and the role Native Americans could play—through the filtered light of the nightly news. Montiel and her daughter, Smoyma, are members of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.
‘Whatever information came out about the Civil Rights Movement about the marches, the March on Washington, I was glued to the TV. I saw Martin Luther King. I saw Jesse Jackson. I wondered, “Where are the Mexicans? Where are the Indians? They’ve got to be in there somewhere. We should be on that march.” I told my father that I wanted to go to that march. But me being so young, he didn’t want me to go. Years later, there was a Chicano Moratorium march in Los Angeles. I told my father again, “I want to go to that march.” Again, he was scared because of the violence that might occur. When I was a sophomore in high school, myself and other Mexican-Indian students and Mexican students, Hispanic students, we formed the first-ever united Mexican-American student chapter at our high school.’