Tag: East Bay

OAKLAND — For nearly 20 years, Diane Williams has seethed whenever she walked by a street mural depicting the genocide of Ohlone people by Spanish colonizers — artwork she finds demeaning because the Native American men are depicted as fully nude.

Just this week, plans to remove the wall art were halted at the last minute, after tenants of the building’s apartments at 41st Street and Piedmont Avenue demanded that the history on display be left alone.

But on Friday morning, Williams finally had a reason to smile as she gazed at the mural. Someone had defaced it overnight with paper cutouts and red paint.

Now, the Franciscan missionaries oppressing the Native Americans in the painting had arrows piercing their heads and bodies. Blood spilled out of the white men. In the same red color, a declaration had been scrawled over the artwork: “THERE, I FIXED IT.”

It was the latest twist in a saga that in recent weeks has divided the North Oakland community surrounding Piedmont Avenue. On Friday, the debate shifted from online circles into public view, engulfing the sidewalk facing the mural.

These arguments mirror a broader discourse about artistic interpretations of history, with shared consensus about the horrors of Indigenous genocide, but more nuanced — and often fierce — disputes about how those stories are remembered, and who should be allowed to tell them.

The mural, painted by artist Rocky Rische Baird, is titled “The Capture of the Solid. The Escape of the Soul.” Baird, who completed the work in 2006 with help from a $5,000 city grant, at the time described the 25-by-10-foot display as a testament that the “spirit of a person can’t be boxed.”

At the center of the painting’s complex imagery are missionaries bringing traditional Western clothes — blue pants, brown boots and a belt with a buckle — to a naked Native man.

The man stands just beyond a vivid swirl of similarly unclothed American Indians with discolored bodies, a jarring imagining of the senseless violence and disease that ravaged the Ohlone people, who first settled in the coastal Northern California land that now comprises much of the Bay Area.

Williams, a 77-year-old Alaskan Athabascan Indian who has lived in East Oakland since the early 1970s, finds plenty of reasons to despise the artwork, the most visceral being its nudity.

“I saw this big old life-sized penis on this Native American, and I was appalled,” said Williams, who often passes the mural on the way to breast cancer treatment at the nearby Kaiser medical centers.

“It’s just culturally inappropriate,” she said, “and historically inaccurate — those Indians weren’t frolicking around naked. Any man would take care to cover his penis.”

Williams, who insists she is “no prude,” reveled Friday in the newfound defacement, saying it retained the Indians’ agency, though she took no credit for the graffiti. The mural has been vandalized before, and already the Native man’s genitals were barely visible because someone had previously tried to obscure the paint.

A woman strolling by on the sidewalk stopped to point a finger directly at Williams.

“The damage that they did now is inexcusable,” the woman, Julia, who provided only her first name, said in reference to the defacement. “Someone had had the guts to put this (mural) here for everyone to see — it should be an honor to you, as a Native!”

“I apologize that it upset you,” Williams responded, “but I’m the one who complained — and I wish we would have spoken when it was painted in 2006.”

Julia declined to give her age but described herself as the building’s oldest tenant. Indeed, many of the residents here had urged the property manager to cancel a planned removal of the mural.

Their anger carried over to the social media website Nextdoor, where in the heat of debate, Williams’ account was recently suspended.

The owner of the building, Albert Sarshar, had earlier been lobbied by Williams to get rid of the artwork but called off the paint-over job this week to give himself “more time to investigate.” Days later, he remains confused about what to do.

“I just want everyone to be happy,” he said.

The owner even consulted with City Councilmember Zac Unger, who declined to weigh in on the debate, telling this news organization, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to dictate speech on private property.”

Williams, meanwhile, insists that there were enough disgruntled Native Americans in the area to stage an upcoming boycott of the building’s primary tenant, a Japanese restaurant named Ebiko. But her earliest protest, in 2006, drew only a handful of people.

Reached this week, several officials at the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe seemed unaware of the mural or the debate surrounding it, even after being provided the Piedmont Avenue address.

“When art is offensive, it stimulates thinking, reflection and responses,” Alan Leventhal, the tribal archaeologist and ethnohistorian, said in an email.

“Although some of the images are indeed provoking,” Leventhal added, “it still sends a message that the history on the genocide of California Indians has been swept under the rug and rendered invisible.”

On the sidewalk, Williams found some allies Friday, including a woman passing by who called the artwork “problematic” and a man who said he had disliked the depiction of brutality since it was first painted two decades ago.

“If this were a picture of slaves and slave owners, what’s really the purpose of that?” said the man, Nedar B., who is Black and gave only the first initial of his last name. “Why does a white person want to put that on display?”

Baird, the original artist, did not respond to interview requests. While painting the mural, he consulted with Andrew Galvan, an Ohlone Indian and curator at the Old Mission Dolores Museum in San Francisco, who defends the advice he gave Baird originally.

“Art provokes conversation,” Galvan said in a statement. “The mural needs proper context. It doesn’t need to be defaced and destroyed.”

Others who engaged Williams on Friday shared that view, including Jacqueline Hackle, who arrived to retrieve a pair of scissors stashed in a newspaper distribution box on the sidewalk.

Earlier in the week, Hackle had cut and duct-taped a formal description of the mural to the wall below, where it identifies views held by Spanish soldiers that Native Americans “needed to be clothed and directed to work in the missions’ fields.”

At one point, several people were simultaneously engaged with Williams in a fierce debate, including neighborhood resident, Valerie Winemiller, who took matters into her own hands — manually ripping off the paper arrowheads while angrily telling Williams to “find another wall and paint your own mural.”

Winemiller had backup, calling to the scene Yano Rivera, a self-described “mural doctor,” who said he specializes in removing graffiti.

“We’re going to very selectively and carefully reunify the painting visually,” Rivera explained. And then he got to work, using cotton balls and varnish to clean up all the blood.