When Greg Goddard began practicing dentistry over thirty years ago, he never thought that he would end up fixing teeth on Alcatraz.

But after Native Americans seized the island in an historic protest against federal Indian policy, the young professional found himself embarking upon a lifelong path of service and healing as Dental Director at the Native American Health Center.

Born in Colorado in 1941, Goddard grew up in rural Southern California, where his family had settled a century earlier. He studied anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, but the life of a desk-bound academic simply didn’t appeal to him.

“I wanted to do something where I was working with my hands,” he said. “I had a science background, which left me basically medicine and dentistry, and I figured dentistry is more working with your hands.”

In 1969 Goddard, still new to the profession, was working at the University of California at San Francisco. That same year, a band of Native American activists seized nearby Alcatraz Island, an uninhabited speck of land in San Francisco Bay. They claimed it as Indian property, focusing America’s attention on the struggle for tribal land rights.

One day during the occupation, a professional colleague asked Goddard if he would volunteer to provide the Indians occupying Alcatraz with dental care. So Goddard began paying weekly visits to the island, where he helped establish a dental clinic.

“I would go out there once a week,” he said. “I’d get on the boat - the old bathtub that was their ferry - and spend the day and then come back.”

With no Indian blood in his family, he knew little about the lives and attitudes of Native Americans in the 20th century. So his forays into the front lines of the civil rights movement proved to be a hands-on learning experience. “It was a whole new culture and militancy that I had not experienced before,” he said.

“A lot of the Indian people at that time were part of the Indian Power movement that grew out of the Black Power movement. A lot of the ethnic minorities in this country were experiencing a nationalism, pride and power. They wanted to end some of the oppression that they had been subjected to. So it was a very eye-opening experience for me.”

To most non-Native Americans, Alcatraz Island is best known as the site of a notorious federal prison that had been closed and abandoned long before the 1969 occupation. One day during the occupation, Goddard decided to see what the inside of the prison looked like.

“‘You’d better not go in there. That’s bad vibes,’” Goddard recalled his Native friends advising him. “‘Our dogs won’t even go in there. They’ll go right up to the gate, but they won’t go inside the prisons.’”

Figuring that he was braver than the dogs, Goddard entered the prison anyway. “But it did have a lot of bad vibes,” he said. “I mean it was a dungeon and it felt really, really bad. You could almost here the prisoners, the history of the prisoners, breathing in there.”

The occupation lasted until 1971, when federal agents ejected the remaining activists by force. Afterwards, “there was a lot of pressure on the government to sort of throw them some crumbs,” said Goddard.

So the government handed over a small, unused medical facility in San Francisco to the activists, who used it to found the Native American Health Center. Once again, Goddard was asked if he would like to participate, this time by helping to create a community dental clinic. “I’ve been there ever since,” he said.

The NAHC operated the original San Francisco clinic, located at 56 Julian, for a quarter of a century, until moving into a new clinic space at 160 Capp Street in 2001.

Working with the NAHC has given Goddard a deeper understanding of Native American culture and community. “I had very little appreciation of that before I came to work here,” he said. “I’ve been educated in, basically, the Native American perspective of the earth, of being one with nature, of being accepting of people, nonjudgmental.”

In fact, it takes a special kind of doctor to flourish at a Native-run clinic like the NAHC. Besides the relatively low pay, doctors wield far less power and prestige than in other, more mainstream health clinics.

“The staff, which is largely Native American, have a big role,” said Goddard. “You have to work under the guidance of more of a cooperative mode, where you’re not making the decisions, which is hard for a lot of professionals that want to be in charge, call all the shots and get high pay.”

This very attitude nearly turned Goddard off to the profession on his first day at dental school. “It didn’t look like the place I wanted to be - very sterile and cold and a bunch of people walking around in white coats,” he said. “It was very authoritarian training with a lot of retired military instructors. So my four years at dental school were pretty miserable.”

But the young student persevered, and has been rewarded with an honored place in the Bay Area’s Native American community. “I’ve received a lot of acceptance and love from the community, for being part of their health care,” he said.

“I’ve also been able to watch the children that I treated grow up, get married, have their own children, and some of those are now starting to have children.”

When not at work or enjoying the company of his wife and daughters, Goddard enjoys tooling around on his twenty-two-foot motorboat. “My main hobby is fishing, and I do a lot of salmon fishing out of San Francisco,” he said.