San Francisco, California, as Tashina Banks Rama steps onto the ship, brings back vivid memories: the ink-black night, the shivering cold, and the shivering waves.
Tashina’s beginnings were as young as a child. But on Thanksgiving Day in November, she and her younger sister would awaken to her parents on the edge of San Francisco Bay, where they were a couple.
At first, it was always quiet and freezing.
Tashina recalls hearing the water splash below as she hopped off the ferry from the pier. As families piled on board, pendleton blankets and star quilts, which had radial bursts of color, would rustle out from bags. A sudden drumbeat would break the silence as the city’s towers and streetlights faded behind them.
A jutting rock, Alcatraz Island, appeared out of the waves before them. As the boat advanced, the air lurched forward with intention.
Tashina, now 51, recalls that “all of a sudden, you have this feeling, this presence of spirituality and ceremony.”
You feel very safe because you are all there for the same reason, even if you may not know who you are with.
An annual Indigenous custom is a sunrise ceremony to welcome the morning’s first rays of light, which Alcatraz, best known for its notorious prison, has hosted for nearly 50 years.
Some people celebrate the continuing survival of tribal nations throughout the Americas by observing their ancestors as a day of thanks.
It is an “un-Thanksgiving” moment for some, an Indigenous response to the cliched colonization stories associated with the Thanksgiving holiday.
However, as the sun rises once more on Alcatraz, long-time attendees are concerned that a new threat could permanently end the gathering on Thursday.
President Trump announced on social media in May that he had ordered the Bureau of Prisons to “reopen a significantly expanded and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
The idea has been criticized by many as being unpractical. Due to its astronomical operating costs, which were triple those of other US federal prisons, the island’s final penitentiary closed in 1963.
Basic supplies must arrive by boat because there is no local source of fresh water on the island. According to one estimate, $ 2 billion would be required to redevelop Alcatraz.
Trump has maintained that he intends to proceed, even ordering his interior secretary and attorney general to conduct a terrain survey in July.
However, Tashina would lose a spiritual tradition that has shaped her generations of indigenous activists, including her father, Dennis Banks, the founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM). She is grieving for herself just because of the thought.
Source: Aljazeera
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