Editor:
Thank you to everyone for attending Foragers at the Minor Theatre in March. We had a sell-out crowd. Shine a Light on Palestine has brought more than a dozen films and documentaries to our community since 2024 to provide a much-needed reality about the genocide and the history behind it. A special term is used by Israeli police to hold Palestinians in prison without evidence or a trial, called “administrative detention.” Foragers highlighted this where Palestinians are arrested by the Israeli police legally forbidding them from collecting artichoke-like ’akkoub which they have done for centuries. Watching Foragers reminded me of author and attorney Amy Bowers Cordinalis’ book The Water Remembers. The state police would wait to “catch” her uncle Ray Mattz fishing in the Klamath where his ancestors had fished since time immemorial. Ray was caught and arrested over and over again like the old Palestinian man in Foragers who refused to stop. Anyone reading this story would feel this tension and injustice. Thanks to Cordalis’ legal work and that of other local tribal members, this law is no longer on the books. Palestinians are Indigenous to the land, too, and are being prevented from doing what they have done for thousands of years. It’s the same playbook, same strategies to dismantle a culture and people. It didn’t work here and it won’t work in Palestine. People are determined to stay on a land they are intimately tied to. Like the salmon here, Palestinians’ lives are physically and spiritually tied to their olive grows, herbal fields, to the smells, light and breeze of their homeland.
Join us for Palestine 36, the final film this spring at the Minor Theatre on May 27 which provides a history of the resistance by Palestinians to end colonization.
Pamela Brown, Arcata
This article appears in Your Local Coven.
