In The Spirit Of Faris Odeh

Over 20 years ago I lived with a Palestinian family around September 11th. It was during dinners of traditional food that our laughter and sometimes tears would solidify our shared struggle as Indigenous People. That very table where we broke Taboon together was where I was told the story of Faris Odeh, a young teenage boy who was immortalized in the pantheon of Palestinian martyrs alongside hundreds of thousands of others, including Muhammad Al-Durrah.

Fast forward 20 years and many movements under my belt later. I heard about a small Jewish group protesting against the genocide in Palestine byway of a small, city-approved sign on a wall along one of the busiest roads in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This particular street along the wall leads up to some of the most famous museums and galleries of Native “fine art” that Santa Fe is known for the world over for.

This Palestinian human rights group had its sign defaced, destroyed and even cut into by the knives of local Santa Fe zionists and residents. These uneducated racists have never understood they live and profit themselves from occupying Indigenous stolen land here too. Cameras installed on this property have continually caught these apartheid advocates defacing images of Palestinian children under the cover of the night.

To those Santa Feans who took knives to the images of Indigenous children, it is clear you poisoned apples did not fall far from your own family’s proverbial hanging tree in terms of westward expansion. Your actions are an extension of your own genocidal heritage and legacy on our continent and in Palestine.

Intervening with street art on adobe walls, which are similar to Palestinian walls, was an easy connection. Street Art never has and never will ask for permission, so these installations are in direct opposition to the city governace of Santa Fe and its homogenized racist upper-class art institutions.

It is upon my own people’s stolen land that I understood long ago the task of a Movement Artist is to create images that unite people for the continuation of our culture and lifeways. It is of my genetic opinion that any Indigenous art, organizations or movements that amount to gimmicks, carceral or otherwise, should be considered traitorous to our struggle, especially those who are currently on the frontlines. These types of self-serving clout chasing tactics are nothing more than a melanated capitalistic hurdle against our collective liberation.

The wheatpaste installations I created were expanded to utilize the whole 150 foot adobe wall instead of being relegated to the 4 ft sign space allocated by the city of Santa Fe. There are so many intersectional analogies in terms of the wall itself, the location and the shared Indigenous history so I wanted to make sure these stories of colonial terror were told in a life-sized fashion.

This particular project required living in solitude with these images and their associated stories for weeks on end in order to shed light on the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. In some cases, this effort included taking grainy videos from 20 years ago and enhancing them through different programs so that the terror of these martyrs last moments could accurately be conveyed to disturb the wealthy and privileged.

Santa Fe and its zionists have clearly made a pact to continue the colonial disruption of Indigenous rights through “city codes”, especially when Palestinians are concerned. However, these settler occupiers needed to be educated about what is really happening in Bethlehem, especially during the holiday season which is when this installation was deployed.

It was during the cold winter weeks of creating this project that I committed to learning more about Faris Odeh …the boy vs. tank …the actual David vs. Goliath …the image of Indigenous struggle which never left my head after decades. I always knew I would do something for him but I never knew what that would be until this opportunity came along.

Faris Odeh would skip school to target state-of-the-art U.S. tanks bought by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to kill his people and destroy Gaza. His mother knowing this, would plead with him to not skip school. Even when locked in his room as punishment for truancy, he would escape through his bedroom window and climb down drains to be back out on the streets resisting – with stones.

What resonated more than anything was when Faris’s mother recalled of him, “It wasn’t the fame he loved,” she said. “In fact, he’d run away from the cameras.” She begged of him, “Okay, you want to throw stones? Fine. But at least hide behind something! Why do you have to be at the very front, even farther up than the older kids?” He told her, “I am not afraid”.

10 days after this famous photo was taken, it would be this tank that would ultimately take his life. He was shot in the neck by an IOF soldier from it. He laid there bleeding out for over an hour with medics not being able to respond because the US tank stood over his body preventing any help until he died.

This was an emotion-filled project not only from Faris’s story but the many others during this project, especially when unrolling these life-size printed images for the first time and seeing Muhammad al-Durrah. The Palestinian boy crouched behind his father in what was his last moment on Earth.

He and his father were caught in the crossfire of IOF snipers who targeted both of them as they hid behind a concrete barrier. [Video Here]

As hard as this project was to complete emotionally, this is nothing compared to what our Indigenous brothers and sisters go through in Palestine and other colonial prisons on a daily basis. I have the privilege and luxury of walking away from the computer screen, the art and that life. They do not get to walk away from anything. Therefore their stories and experiences should remain, never to be forgotten.

When the children of Palestine, like Fawzi al-Junaidi, are caught resisting, the IOF will raid their homes and schools. They will kick down doors to snatch them from their loved ones at gunpoint. Indigenous children are disappeared into a system of cages to be interrogated and tortured. This same state state-sponsored terrorism is happening along the southern U.S. and Mexico border. In fact, the high-tech wall technology that has been perfected against the Palestinian people is now being imported from the IOF to the O’odham People and other tribes along the colonially imposed and enforced southern US border.

What the average American settler does not understand is that Indigenous children in cages has been normalized on our continent since colonial contact. In order to secure natural resources their celebrated colonizer, Christopher Columbus, separated families by keeping men and boys in cages as slaves to mine for gold quotas while our girls and women were trafficked as sex slaves for his crew.

Not much has changed for us Indigenous of Turtle Island in the last 530 years of what can only be perceived as a slow kill agenda. However, we still exist and in the spirit of many Indigenous warriors like Hatuey, Manuelito and Faris, ….we still resist. 

They were not afraid.

We shouldn’t be either.

This was for you, Faris.

As long I live, so will you because you are me and I am you.

Posted on January 5, 2020 in Culture, Indigenous Rights, Politics, Social Justice, Street Art

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