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!"
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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.
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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/.
