Opinion: Indigenous rights clash with fed’s border wall

Colonialism is alive and, well, not healthy for Southern Arizona’s original people.

Despite what has most often ended in futility for Indigenous people, the Tohono O’odham Nation and its people are resisting further federal efforts at colonization.

Foremost in the nation’s continuous fight against five centuries of white European intrusion is opposition to federal plans for a 30-foot-high double border wall that threatens to slash a literal and figurative scar through what remains of its ancestral lands.

As descendants of the original people on territory that white-dominated institutions and individuals now lord over, the Tohono O’odham have 10,000 years of history and thus rightful domain over the region, notwithstanding the patronizing “land acknowledgements” that some institutions proffer, their written and oral monotones revealing fallacious respect.

Indigenous claims should supersede the “deference to the government” that a federal judge cited in rejecting tribal arguments that plans for 62 miles of new border wall violate the nation’s sovereignty, shrink the size and access to its ancestral territory and are tantamount to trespassing.

For starters, the U.S.-Mexican border running through Tohono O’odham land is an arbitrary line that white politicians drew in the 1850s to ensure expansion of their own colonial power and economic well-being.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, 2,300 miles away in a Washington, D.C., courtroom, acknowledged existence of a “broader aboriginal territory” on both sides of the border, reporter Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services wrote on Aug. 16.

“There are currently 17 O’odham communities with approximately 2,000 members in Mexico,” Fischer quoted from Leon’s ruling. “And members of the nation continue to cross the border for sacred pilgrimages and ceremonies and important religious and cultural sites.”

How they will “continue to cross” with a pair of 30-foot-high steel bollard barriers is a question the judge didn’t bother to address. He ignored that descendants of the original occupants hold rights transcending any 16th- to 21st-century claims by white Europeans.

We and they are latecomers, from conquistadore Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1540 and the Spanish military establishing presidios starting in 1752, to the Gadsden Purchase in 1854 and the “Roosevelt Reservation” of 1907.

That last neo-historical event, President Theodore Roosevelt’s unilateral proclamation that a 60-foot-wide strip of land along the border belongs to the federal government, was and is a clear encroachment on ancestral lands of the Tohono O’odham.

Roosevelt’s fiat was the basis for Leon’s ruling that “historical evidence casts doubt” on the Tohono O’odham claim.

Prehistorical evidence, the 10 millennia that oral tradition establishes the O’odham have lived here, casts doubt on claims by newcomers, meaning most of us. No white man’s hearkening to English common law or U.S. laws and proclamations should prevail. Yet they do, as unremorseful white colonization continues.

Tohono O’odham Tribal Chairman Verlon José hinted the nation may appeal.

“There are too many critical issues that were not adequately addressed,” reporter Fischer quoted José as saying. “The judge’s opinion is the judge’s opinion. And I think, at the end of the day, the law will rule.”

An appeal is essential, given the prehistoric and historic evidence that belies a mindset driving policies and decisions contradicting the historical truth. That includes the ruling of a judge who is a descendant of white European immigrants.

Bear in mind that unless one has Indigenous ancestry, that is descended from the people who have lived here for millennia, we are newcomers, and our antecedents were colonizers. That should mean acquiescence to the original people, their land, culture and rights as human beings.