Adam Fortunate Eagle

A member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and Bay Area local, Adam Nordwall received the name Fortunate Eagle from a member of the Crow Nation when he was forty-two. In 1964 he led a group to Alcatraz to try and reclaim the island; four years later he used a ceremonial Native American stick to remove a Columbus’s reenactor’s toupee during a Columbus Day celebration. “It outraged the Italians,” he told a newspaper years later, “but the rest of the crowd thought it was hilarious.”