A REMINDER OF FREEDOM

A kite from Ai WeiWei's exhibit seen through a broken window

The foghorns echoed throughout our apartment on the morning we decided to go to Alcatraz. I had been to the island in 2014 when the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei's exhibit was installed, but Bill had never been.  The comments by Trump about opening up the prison again motivated us to go. The National Park Service runs Alcatraz, the former notorious prison. We wondered if the government shutdown would affect our visit.

We purchase ticket earlier in the week during our San Francisco sunny, warm "summer" at the end of October. It is now November and the foghorns reminded us how quickly weather can change on the San Francisco Bay. All we could see out of our windows were skyscrapers wrapped in fog. The Bay has disappeared, but we decided to give Alcatraz a try.

We boarded the ferry, looked out towards the Bay, still covered in a wall of fog. As the ferry moved though, the fog receded in front of us so that by the time we got to the island, the sun was shining down on us. Our luck had changed.

Alcatraz crumbles more with each wind-blown rainstorm. The prison cells still stand at the peak of the island, but the decay is evident all around. Toilets and sinks in cells are broken, windows are cracked, some buildings are nothing but rubble. In 2014, Alcatraz became the perfect place for WeiWei's exhibit, which wandered through the crumbling buildings. At the time WeiWei was being persecuted by the Chinese government for his outspoken creative views. The Ai WeiWei installations on Alcatraz expressed ideas about freedom and incarceration, and the constraints on freedom of speech because of censorship. Though the WeiWei exhibit is long gone from the island, the memory of the messages remain in my mind. Alcatraz, a place with all of its history of incarceration, brutality, and censorship, made that exhibit twice as powerful -- similar to walking through the shadows of Auschwitz where that history still lingers in every brick and corner.

The Recreation Yard at Alcatraz

After listening to the National Park employee explain the rules for tourists, we walked towards the steep trail that leads to the top where the prison cells are located. A sign diverted our attention and led us to an exhibit about the Native American occupation of the island in 1969. The stories of the takeover filled several rooms and explained the island's previous history as a military prison for conscientious objectors in WWI, rebellious Chinese immigrants, and Native peoples who were unwilling to move to reservations or allow their children to attend the so-called Indian schools that tried to erase native tribe cultures.

The new exhibit was a truth-teller, a surprise to me after I had read that many, more comprehensive versions of our history are being removed from other nationally supervised places, such as at the Smithsonian. The exhibit shows how the Alcatraz takeover by the All Tribes group helped to develop unity among native tribes, and publicized the history of Native peoples since the migration of Whites from our eastern shores. The stories include the removal and attempts at genocide of Native Tribes and the destruction of their cultures. A summary of what the year and a half occupation by the All Tribes achieved concluded the exhibit. The island occupiers became leaders in their communities, championing the ways of native peoples, showing reslience and the importance of peaceful, non-violent actions. Today, we see some of the results of takeovers in our recognition of who lived on the land before America, the return of land to various tribes, and, recently, the removal of four dams on the Klamath River that helped salmon return to their original spawning grounds while restoring an eco-system that been lost because of the dams. The exhibit, like the WeiWei exhibit, explored themes of freedom, incarceration, and censorship, whose ideas are just as timely and powerful as they were in 2014. We still have much to do.

Article about the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the All-Tribes Occupation:

https://www.parksconservancy.org/park-e-ventures-article/alcatraz-occupation-anniversary-stories-first-person-native-american-rights-indians-of-all-tribes

General history of Alcatraz

https://www.bop.gov/about/history/alcatraz.jsp

Because of the development of the Red Power movement, land has been returned to Native people as well as the removal of dams on the Klamath River, Watch the videos to see how the dams were de-constructed:

https://news.mongabay.com/2024/10/largest-dam-removal-ever-driven-by-tribes-kicks-off-klamath-river-recovery/ 

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I have resided on Tongva, Tamien-Ohlone, and Miwok land in California, and Lenape land in New York City.