The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Border wall construction continues in the San Rafael Valley, on Nov. 15, 2025.
On May 15, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security requested proposals from contractors to build the border wall through the middle of the Tohono O’odham Nation. A same-day email notified the Nation’s chairman, Verlon Jose, that the “Tucson 5 Wall Project” would install 62 miles of wall, a patrol road and monitoring infrastructure.
For many Tohono O’odham, the 175-year-old border between the United States and Mexico is still a new thing, but one they have learned to live with. In contrast, the proposed 30-foot-high primary and secondary vertical barriers and hundreds of miles of construction roads and infrastructure would make this once-imaginary line far too real and unacceptably intrusive.
So, on June 16, 2026, the Nation pushed back. The Nation’s request to the District Court for the District of Columbia affirms that U.S. law does not allow the executive branch to take or repurpose reservation lands without legislative branch authorization. The Nation asks the court to halt construction before it divides their cultural and natural landscape.
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Legalities aside, O’odham history and archaeology give the Tohono O’odham Nation and its 37,000-plus citizens sound reasons for resisting the bisection of their territory.
In the first meeting between designated U.S. and Tohono O’odham representatives, on June 29, 1855, U.S. Army Maj. William H. Emory confirmed the terms of the prior year’s Gadsden Purchase Treaty, whereby the U.S. acquired from Mexico the responsibilities for governing O’odham territory north of the border. Emory made clear that “all the rights that they possessed under Mexico are guarantied [sic] to them by the United States.”
U.S. officials and Tohono O’odham acted accordingly. Executive orders signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 and 1917, and subsequently ratified by Congress, recognized the Nation’s continuous ownership of the ruggedly beautiful reservation lands north of Mexico. Invisible except for mile markers and cattle fences, the border had little effect on O’odham lives or territory through the 1900s.
Cooperation between U.S. and Tohono O’odham officials addressed border security. Beginning in the 1970s, the Nation hosted Border Patrol offices and approved vehicle barriers and smuggling detection systems. The Nation also supported the Shadow Wolves, an all-Indigenous border security force that integrates traditional knowledge with digital surveillance techniques.
Government-to-government collaborations allowed borderland life to continue as it had for centuries. Tohono O’odham citizens living in Mexico journeyed into Arizona to participate in social and religious activities, and vice versa. Boys followed ancient Salt Pilgrimage trails to exchange offerings for salt from the Sea of Cortez and thereby claim their adulthood. People, prayers and knowledge flowed freely to perpetuate O’odham identity, language and society.
O’odham geography inscribes these flows. Poetically named mountains, valleys, villages and water sources — “Havañ Naggiak” (Raven Hanging), “Komkich’ed ’E Vaa’osidk” (Where the Turtle Got Stuck) and “Shajkoñ Do’ag”(Mountain with Pieces Carved Out), among others — breathe spirit and story into terrain that seems inhospitable to some. The archaeological record of O’odham territory bulges with shrines, with trails engraved in desert pavement and with petroglyph-emblazoned boulders and cliffsides bearing “perpetual prayers,” supplications for harmony, abundance and for the rain essential to all desert life.
The border-wall extension plan disregards and would interrupt this intimate history of continuous co-adjustments among human and ecological communities. The proposed walls would clutter, degrade and impede the natural views of sacred places that inspire spiritual dreams and guide pilgrimages. O’odham Salt Pilgrimages and the prayers and offerings they carry would be diverted into secular bottlenecks. Previous border-wall construction episodes have callously violated highly sensitive Indigenous landmarks, and the newly proposed operations would grind through sacred peaks, shrines and prayerful petroglyphs.
Native American societies have thrived for millennia in and through respectful relationships with one another and nature. It might be well for the U.S. to heed the Tohono O’odham request to lay off the Christian nationalism, insensitive engineering and bare-knuckle power plays that undergird the border wall, at least on what is and always has been O’odham land.
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John R. Welch is a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and does research and outreach at Archaeology Southwest, a Tucson-based nonprofit.
