América del Norte

Indigenous peoples vow to bring down apartheid border wall

Brenda Norrell

04/12/2007

Opinión

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The Indigenous Peoples' Border Summit of the Americas 2007 began with a human rights delegation visit to the border and after four days of activities concluded with a vow to "bring down the wall."

Indigenous delegates to the border on Tohono O'odham Nation land took a tour of conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border here and returned in outrage.

"We saw it all firsthand in America," said Bill Means, Lakota and cofounder of the International Indian Treaty Council on Nov. 8. He is also a member of the Indigenous delegation on the border here south of Sells, Arizona, charged with the mission of documenting human rights abuses for a report to the United Nations.

The group became an eyewitness to the presence of federal agents, the hovering customs helicopter, the profiteering contractors, the federal spy towers, the "cage" detention center, and the arrest of a group of indigenous peoples—mostly women and children—by the U.S. Border Patrol on an Indian Nation.

The human rights delegation included Mohawks, Oneida, Navajo, Acoma Pueblo, Hopi, and O'odham representatives. Near the border, at the scene of the arrests, Mohawks stood before U.S. Border Patrol agents and held their fists high in solidarity, as the Border Patrol packed nearly a dozen Mexicans into one vehicle.

"We were passing some of our strength on to them to fight," said Kahentinetha Horn of the Mohawk Women Title Holders.

The delegation also visited the new federal spy tower next to Homeland Security's migrant detention center known as "the cage" on the Tohono O'odham Nation. The first stop, however, was the abomination of the new vehicle barrier wall being constructed on O'odham land.

Horn commented on the callousness of the Tohono O'odham district official who led the tour and spoke in favor of the border barrier. The delegation issued severe criticisms of Tohono O'odham officials who, in the words of Diné (Navajo) delegate Lenny Foster, "defend the policies of genocide" on the border.

The indigenous delegation documenting the abuses planned to intervene in the arrests, but the Border Patrol crowded the group into a vehicle and left quickly. "I came away feeling very frustrated and very discouraged," Kahentinetha said.

Border Summit Debate

Speaking a few hours later to the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit of the Americas II in San Xavier, Means called for solidarity of indigenous peoples throughout the world to halt the arrests of indigenous migrants walking north in search of a better life, and solidarity to bring down the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

"One inch of intrusion into our land is not acceptable!" Mohawk Mark Maracle told the Border Summit. "I became very angry when I saw those guys rounding up our people."

He added, "It is a violation of our Great Law to witness what we did today and do nothing about it."

Jay Johnson Castro of Del Rio Texas, a leader of protests against the imprisonment of migrant children at Hutto prison in Texas and the border wall in Texas, stated, "I hear 'sovereign nation,' but I didn't see a sovereign nation."

Castro said the buildings near the border on the Tohono O'odham Nation are labeled with signs, "'Homeland Security and Tohono O'odham Nation,' like they are in partnership."

Maracle said all Indian nations need to come together and stop what is happening here. "I know from past experience with the Mohawk Warrior Society where our power lies, it is with the people." He added a warning to the people of the O'odham nation: "If you don't stop and grab hold of your destiny, there is not going to be one for your children."

Chris George, Oneida from Canada, told how the Border Patrol approached the summit delegation and demanded to know who authorized them to be at the border.

"No one authorizes us to do anything. It was the Creator who took us there," George replied.

Foster, an advocate for Native ceremonial rights for inmates, said what he witnessed at the border was "brutal, vicious, and evil." He noted that Diné know that all human beings have five fingers, but that he witnessed district officials and federal agents who had no concept of the five-fingered humanity they share with the migrants. "They were robots."

While the Indigenous Border Summit was at the gate, an attorney for the O'odham in Mexico was prevented from crossing into the United States on Tohono O'odham land by the U.S. Border Patrol, even though he held a letter from Tohono O'odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris requesting him to come and meet with him on that day. Overruling Chairman Norris on Tohono O'odham land, the U.S. Border Patrol agent said the attorney must have a U.S. visa to enter, and not just a letter from Chairman Norris.

At the border wall construction at the gate, Means said one of the workers told them, "The Israelis are helping us put up the fence." Indeed, border wall contractor Boeing has subcontracted Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense contractor that participated in constructing security walls in Palestine. The lead contractor Boeing subcontracted Elbit Systems for security work on the U.S.-Mexico Secure Border Initiative. Elbit is also participating in building the wall between Israel and Palestine.

Means noted that even though the Berlin Wall had come down, now there are other walls to divide the people, including the wall between Israel and Palestine.

True Sovereignty for Indigenous Nations Remains to be Seen

After traveling to the Tohono O'odham Nation border with Mexico, an indigenous peoples' delegation from the summit unleashed a new movement to honor the lives and deaths of migrants.

Diana Joe, a Yaqui woman who worked the fields on both sides of the border as a child, said, "May the farmworker people live long!" Horn said it is time to stop "crying about all our suffering" and acting subjugated, and time to take action. "Why don't we just go out and pick those people up?" she said of the indigenous peoples walking in the desert. She urged people to start taking down the border wall.

Mike Wilson, Tohono O'odham, said it is important to dispel the myth of indigenous sovereignty in the United States. "We have no sovereignty. We only have the sovereignty that the U.S. Congress allows us that day."

Wilson said if the Tohono O'odham Nation were truly sovereign, it would not have an occupying army and unchecked police power on its land. Federal forces including the Border Patrol, National Guard, and Immigration and Customs agents patrol all parts of the tribe's territory. Wilson said children as young as six years old have been imprisoned in the unit known as "the cage" on O'odham land at San Miguel.

Wilson, a strong proponent of migrants' rights among indigenous peoples described searching for the bodies of migrants who have died on Indian lands. Since 2006, 246 migrants have died in the Tucson Border Patrol sector, where the Border Patrol's inhumane border policies are enforced.

On the Tohono O'odham Nation, 65 people perished in the desert. Wilson is now searching the desert for the remains of another five human beings.
"Where is the moral outrage?" Wilson asked. In July, Wilson found the body of a 17-year-old who was seven months pregnant.

Wilson said the Tohono O'odham Nation spent $16 million to build a new cultural center. "Not one penny was spent to prevent migrant deaths." It is time, he said, for Native people to confront the myth of sovereignty and stop acting as accomplices to attempts to hide the reality of the victims, while using their own victimization as an excuse. "It is time to emerge from silence about the women, men, children, and unborn children who die on Indian lands for want of a drink of water."

Wilson displayed a huge pile of his plastic water jugs from his water stations on O'odham land that had been slashed. He said that people talk of outside Minutemen, but these are "O'odham Minutemen," and added that the time had come for all people to become a voice for the mummified migrants found dead in the desert. "They have no voice."

Petuuche Gilbert, Acoma Pueblo from New Mexico, described the colonized thinking that the border delegation experienced on Tohono O'odham land.
Gilbert recalled the words of an Acoma Pueblo member referring to the Catholic Church. "They made slaves out of us to make this church. I guess that's why we are Catholics now."

He pointed out that the border wall is going up on Indian lands because Indian Nations are not able to block the fence "because we do not have that sovereignty over our lands, territories, and natural resources." Gilbert said that one day, Indian Nations would be sovereign nations again.

Johnson Castro denounced abuses at the Don T. Hutto Detention Center near Austin, Texas, where migrant babies and children are imprisoned, and the Raymondville migrant internment camp near Brownsville, Texas.

"Near the Texas capitol, there are hundreds of children in a prison-for-profit," Castro said of Hutto. Describing conditions before the protests began, he noted that children were kept in cells separate from their parents, wore prison uniforms, and were given expired milk to drink.

Castro recounted that a woman was sexually assaulted by a guard in front of her child. The guard was never even charged. "We don't know what happened to the mother and child," Castro said.

Homeland Security denied entry to T. Don Hutto Detention Center in Taylor, Texas, near Austin, to the United Nations' Rapporteur on migrants, Jorge Bustamante, in May. At Raymondville internment camp, a prison guard exposed the fact that migrants were being fed food with maggots in it. The United States is one of only two countries in the world, the other being Somalia, that does not legally ensure the rights of the child and has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Castro noted that the increase in detentions is part of "Operation Endgame," a U.S. policy to remove all "aliens" that is now in its fourth year.

The Border Summit ended by declaring an end to discrimination against migrants and the need for a new era of human rights. Participants renewed their determination to halt the border wall and hold the Tohono O'odham Nation responsible for the deaths of men, women, children, and unborn children who have died on O'odham lands "for want of a drink of water."

As Mohawk Mark Maracle put it, "It doesn't take a lot of people to bring down this border wall!"

Segment from the final declaration adopted by the Participants in the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit of the Americas II on Nov. 10, 2007, San Xavier, Tohono O'odham Nation

We express our collective outrage for the extreme levels of suffering and inhumanity, including many deaths and massive disruption of way of life, that have been presented to this Summit as well as what we have witnessed in our visit to the border areas during the Summit as a result of brutal and racist U.S. policies being enforced on the Tohono O'odham traditional homelands and elsewhere along the U.S./Mexico border.

We also recognize that many of our inherent, sacred, and fundamental human rights, including our cultural rights and freedom of religion, self-determination and sovereignty, environmental integrity, land and water rights, bio-diversity of our homelands, equal protection under the law, Treaty Rights, Free Prior Informed Consent, Right to Mobility, Right to Food and Food Sovereignty, Right to Health, Right to Life, Rights of the Child, and Right to Development among others, are being violated by current border and "immigration" policies of various settler governments.

We also strongly affirm the message expressed by many of the Indigenous delegates at this gathering: to be sovereign, and to be recognized as sovereign, we must act sovereign and assert our sovereignty in this and all other matters.

We therefore present this report with the intention of proposing, developing, and strengthening real and effective solutions to this critical issue:

We call upon the United Nations and the International community:

To end international policies which support economic globalization, "free-trade agreements," destruction of traditional food systems and traditional land-based economies, and land and natural resource appropriation which result in the forced relocation, forced migration, and forced removal of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico, Guatemala, and other countries, and cause Indigenous Peoples to leave their homelands and seek economic support for their families in other countries.

To ensure that the UN human rights system pressures States to provide protection and take action to prevent the violence, abuse, and imprisonment of Indigenous woman and children along the borders who often bear the worse effects of current policies; to also implement immediate and urgent measures and provide oversight to end the physical, physiological, and sexual violence that is currently being perpetrated against them with impunity as a result of their migrant status, whether it is being carried out by employers, human traffickers, private contractors, and/or government agents.

To implement International Laws and mechanisms to prohibit the practice by the United States and other States of the production, storage, export, and use of banned and toxic pesticides and other chemicals on the lands of Indigenous Peoples.

To provide protection under its mechanism addressing Human Rights Defenders to review and monitor all laws and policies which criminalize humanitarian aid to immigrating persons and provide protection for those carrying out these humanitarian acts.

To call upon the United Nations Permanent Forum 7th Session to recognize and take into consideration this Report and its recommendations and to transmit them to the United Nations system to ensure their implementation.

To establish as a priority by the Human Rights Council, its committees, subsidiary bodies, Special Rapporteurs; the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, and other Treaty monitoring bodies; the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; and all other appropriate UN bodies and mechanisms to monitor the compliance to international Human Rights obligation of the United States, Mexico, Canada, and all other States in the creation and implementation of Border and immigration policies, in particular those affecting Indigenous Peoples.

To call upon the CERD to specifically examine U.S. immigration laws, policies, and practices as a form of racially based persecution and racial discrimination.

We call upon State/Country Governments and Federal Agencies:

To fully honor, implement, and uphold the Treaties, Agreements, and Constructive Arrangements which were freely concluded with Indigenous Peoples and First Nations, in accordance with their original spirit and intent as understood by the respective Indigenous Peoples.

To fully implement, honor, and respect the rights to land, natural resources, and Self- determination, which includes the right to freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development, for Indigenous Peoples in their traditional home lands.

To immediately initiate effective consultations with impacted indigenous peoples who are divided by borders for the development of respectful guidelines relating to border crossings by those indigenous peoples which ensure the recognition of each indigenous nation as culturally distinct and politically unique autonomous peoples and uphold their rights to move freely and maintain relationships within their homelands.

To respect and facilitate the use of Indigenous Nations/tribal passports, identifications, and immigration documents for travel across imposed borders, specifically tribes along settler borders between Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

To end to the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border along all Tribal and Indian Nation lands, and an end to military and law-enforcement activity and occupation in Indigenous Peoples' lands everywhere, without their free, prior informed consent.

To end forced assimilation perpetuated by immigration policies which categorize of Indigenous Peoples as "white" or "Hispanic/Latino" while they are in the process immigrating, acquiring residency and/or naturalization in the United States or other countries.

To end the production and export of pesticides which have been banned for use in the United States and other countries, and to accept full legal accountability for the health and environmental impacts of such chemicals that have contaminated Indigenous peoples, their health, lands, waters, traditional subsistence, food systems, and sacred sites.

To end to the continual violation of the Native American Freedom of Religion Act and the destruction, desecration, and denial of access for Indigenous Peoples to their sacred sites and cultural objects along the border areas, and to enforce all cultural, religious freedom, and environmental protection laws and polices for federal agencies operating in these regions.

To provide protection for and end the intimidation of Indigenous and other peoples providing humanitarian aid along and within tribal lands to Indigenous and other displaced migrant peoples crossing the borders and to call for an immediate end to the criminalization of such expressions of basic human caring and assistance.

To end to the ongoing environmental contamination, ecosystem destruction, and waste dumping on Indigenous and tribal lands along the border by the military, border patrols, and private contractors doing business with federal agencies.

To ensure that the U.S. Border Patrol and other federal agencies operating on or near Indigenous Peoples' lands are held fully and legally accountable for restoration, reparations, and/or remediation of any damages or harm they have caused to peoples, ecosystems, and places, in full consultation with the affected persons and Peoples.

To reinstate the Sovereign rights of Indigenous Peoples whose rights and status have been terminated through colonialist rule of law and daily practices of forced assimilation in all countries.

To ensure respect for Indigenous Peoples' land and resource rights in their own homelands in all countries as the most effective way to address immigration issues and Indigenous Peoples' human rights concerns overall.

To implement humane immigration policies that fully respect the inherent human rights of all Peoples and persons and fully comply with States' obligations under International Human Rights Law.

Brenda Norrell is a freelance writer and Americas Policy Program border analyst, www.americaspolicy.org. Her blog can be found at http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/.

For More Information:

Indigenous Border Summit of the Americas 2007 http://indigenousbordersummitamericas2007.blogspot.com/

Source: Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP): americas.irc-online.org