San Bernardino Valley College is celebrating one of its own during Native American Heritage Month.

Since 2017, SBVC has hosted the John Trudell Poetry Festival in honor of alumnus, poet, and Native American rights advocate John Trudell. He was born in Omaha in 1946, and grew up on the Santee Sioux reservation.

Trudell enrolled at SBVC in 1967 because it was the only community college at the time with a radio and television broadcasting department. In a 2013 interview with the Inland Empire Community News, Trudell said he learned all aspects of television production in his two years at SBVC, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.

In 1969, Trudell brought his family to Alcatraz as part of a Native American effort to reclaim the island they considered ancestral land. He credited his broadcasting experience at SBVC for his ability to convey the Native American point of view; Trudell was the movement’s spokesman.

Trudell later led the American Indian Movement from 1973 to 1979. That year, his pregnant wife Tina, three children, and mother-in-law died in a suspicious house fire just hours after Trudell burned an American flag on the steps of an FBI building in Washington, D.C. A devastated Trudell withdrew from public life for a few years.  “It was when I was looking for something to hang on to, to keep me connected to this reality, that I started writing,” Trudell was quoted as saying in his archives. “Tina was the writer. She wrote poetry. And almost six months after the fire, when I was looking for help— I was looking to cut any spiritual deal. I was pissed off at God, at the Great Spirit, at all of ’em because this was a betrayal to me ... And then the lines came. The lines were my bombs, my explosions, my tears, they were my everything.” 

John Trudell

Hall of Fame Alumnus John Trudell