Biography
Grace Thorpe was a Sac and Fox Nation activist, World War II veteran (a WAC corporal who earned a Bronze Star in the New Guinea campaign), and the youngest daughter of the Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe. A prominent figure in the Red Power movement, she served as publicist and negotiator during the 1969–71 occupation of Alcatraz Island and joined subsequent land-reclamation occupations. She was arrested and charged with trespassing on June 6, 1970 during the Pit River Tribe's takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric land at Big Bend, California (one of 34 arrested). In her later decades she became a nationally known anti-nuclear activist, founding the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans (NECONA) and pressuring tribes to reject federal nuclear-waste storage on Native lands.
