Thread: Triple fence along border would split Indian tribe

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Triple fence along border would split Indian nation


'We didn't ask for this,' tribal chairwoman says
By Greg Gross
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
October 22, 2006

SELLS, Ariz. – The latest front in the federal government's struggle to control the border with Mexico runs partly across 75 miles of sand, tall saguaro cactuses and mesquite creosote brush, guarded by brooding mountains 8,000 feet high.

PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
Baboquivari Peak dominates the desert landscape east of the Tohono O'odham reservation in Arizona, where planned border fencing would cut off tribal members from those in Mexico.
Congress wants to build a triple fence along the border to make it tougher for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers trying to cross. The barricade would divide an American Indian tribe whose people were on this land four millenniums before the birth of Christ.
“We didn't ask for this fence to be built here,” said Chairwoman Vivian Juan-Saunders of the Tohono O'odham Nation. “We have some individuals who feel the federal government can come onto the Nation and do what they want.”

The Secure Fence Act of 2006, passed in late September, requires 700 miles of border fence from Texas to California, including a stretch extending 10 miles east and 10 miles west of Tecate in San Diego County.

It has generated mixed feelings among some Tohono O'odham, who oppose being walled off from roughly 1,400 tribal members in Mexico, but who also are losing patience with the flood of illegal immigration crossing their desert.

Traditionally, the Tohono O'odham were able to move between their reservation and Mexican territory through informal portals such as the San Miguel Gate, little more than a gap in a barbed-wire cattle fence. Tribal members in Mexico came north for medical and other reservation services, while their Arizona counterparts would head south to Magdalena, in the Mexican state of Sonora, for cultural and religious events.

The proposed fence would force them to use official ports of entry miles away in Sasabe or Nogales. There are no public buses on the reservation, and nearly half of the Tohono O'odham don't own a car.

“It's not a fence. It's more like a wall,” said Harriet Toro, 59, who lives about four miles from the border. “I don't think our people are supportive of a solid wall.”

PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
Tohono O'odham Officer Allery Antone stood by as the Border Patrol searched a van that crossed over from Mexico on Oct. 5. Tribal police detain up to 6,000 illegal immigrants a year for the Border Patrol.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, is a principal supporter of this latest fence initiative. Hunter's office sponsored bills leading to the construction of similar barriers in San Diego.
“Border fencing is not the only aspect of our border security matrix,” Hunter wrote in a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “However, its proven success clearly indicates that it is an integral piece of our overall strategy.”

Federal government plans to build a vehicle barrier along the same 75-mile stretch have the full backing of the reservation, Juan-Saunders said, but many oppose a triple border fence.

Unanswered letters
The tribal chairwoman sent letters to Congress, including Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl, expressing concern. Juan-Saunders has yet to receive an answer.
The senators did not respond to calls to their offices.

The Tohono O'odham have seen their land divided twice before by the United States and Mexico, by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and by the Gadsden Purchase six years later.

Mexico doesn't recognize Tohono O'odham sovereignty in Mexican territory, and bills in Washington proposed in the 1990s to grant dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship to Tohono O'odham members in Mexico died without a hearing.

PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
A storage room at the Tohono O'odham police department was stacked with bales of pot and other illegal drugs seized on the reservation. One resident said some illegal immigrants carry small amounts of drugs to trade for food and water.
“As far as I'm concerned, that's still our land in Mexico,” Toro said.
The tribe numbers about 30,000 registered members, of whom about 13,000 live on the 4,500-square-mile reservation, an hour's drive southwest of Tucson.

The largest tribal population lives in Sells, a dusty town of about 3,000 some 25 miles north of the border. The rest are scattered in an area of nearly 3 million acres, slightly smaller than Connecticut.

These days, for those who live near the border, it is the specter of illegal immigration that looms over this desert land.

“They come at all hours of the night. You really can't sleep,” Toro said. “They steal clothes off our lines. They want to use your phone.

“I guess I'm a captive in my own home because of what's going on around us.”

Richard Saunders, Nation police chief and Juan-Saunders' husband, said, “We've had as many as a hundred turn up at somebody's back door, or walking through the desert.”

PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
“We have some individuals who feel the federal government can come onto the Nation and do what they want.”
–Vivian Juan-Saunders, chairwoman of the Tohono O'odham Nation

The Tohono O'odham traditionally have been sympathetic toward the illegal immigrants heading north for jobs, “but over time. . . it's just gotten out of hand,” Toro said.
With the increased traffic has come “increasing violence to our people, with homes being burglarized and people just living in fear,” Juan-Sanders said.

The twin flow of illegal immigrants and narcotics also is increasingly exposing the Tohono O'odham people to drugs, Toro said.

“What some of the (illegal immigrants) have started doing is carrying small amounts (of illegal drugs) to trade for food and water,” she said. “One girl took it to school and was just giving it out. Marijuana.”

All of this is happening in a region where official unemployment estimates from the Nation exceed 40 percent. Per-capita income is $19,000 a year. Nearly half the households have no electricity or telephone service. Almost one-third are without plumbing.

A block from the tribe's modest government headquarters, cows wander freely. Homes that would be condemned anywhere else, boarded up and covered with graffiti, are being lived in.

Dirt-lot lunches
The second-busiest restaurant in town is a dirt lot, where enterprising cooks dish up lunch from the back of a pickup. In tiny villages such as Cowlic, the only signs of life are coyotes, the occasional bird of prey and gang graffiti. Flash floods regularly cut dirt roads, stranding whole communities.

PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
Memorials to those who died in traffic accidents or crossing the desert dot the 4,500-square-mile Tohono O'odham reservation, an hour's drive southwest of Tucson. More than 300 illegal immigrants, from grandmothers to young children, have been found dead on the Nation's land since 2002.
Fifty-two percent of Tohono O'odham people suffer from adult-onset or Type 2 diabetes, a rate six times higher than the rest of the United States. Life expectancy for men here doesn't reach 60.
“Look at the poverty, look at the housing, look at the education, look at the despair,” said Anna Paxson, a waitress at Sells' lone café.

Smugglers are taking advantage of the Tohono O'odhams' condition to lure some of them into becoming smugglers.

“Teenagers are dropping out of school,” Paxson said. “They can make several thousand in a day, just by transporting drugs and illegal aliens.”

The price can be just as high: Those caught helping smugglers on the reservation face not only criminal charges, but are banished from the Nation.

All this keeps the tribal police busy. The small force of 64 officers spends 60 percent of its time dealing with border issues, police chief Saunders said. When they spot illegal immigrants on reservation land, they hold them for the Border Patrol, up to 6,000 a year.

Those who survive, that is.

More than 300 have been found dead on Tohono O'odham land since 2002, from grandmothers to children as young as 3, sometimes in terrain so isolated that Nation officers must be lowered from helicopters to retrieve the bodies.

“A lot of them were in poor health to begin with. They've been walking for days, some of them for weeks,” Saunders said. “They get up here, and they're dying up here.”

Then there's all the trash left behind by illegal immigrants crossing the desert, 72 tons of it in 2004 alone. That doesn't count the hundreds of stolen and abandoned cars, almost none of which belong to tribal members.

The tribe has picked up and fixed enough abandoned bicycles on their land to hand them out to 1,500 needy children.

“They clean it up, and weeks later, there's a repeat of it,” Saunders said.

As a result of all this, the Tohono O'odham government has leased the Border Patrol space for two substations.

'Bending over backward'
“We are bending over backward to assist the federal government (against drug and immigrant smuggling), and all that we ask for in return is respect for our people, our land and the sovereignty of the Tohono O'odham Nation,” Juan-Saunders said.
Estimates of illegal immigration's financial impact on the Tohono O'odham reach $7 million a year – $3 million in law enforcement costs alone, funded by revenue from their two casinos and other sources.

“We've spent $132,000 (this year) just in autopsy costs,” the tribal police chief said. “Nobody has helped us pay for any of this.”

Nation officers seize more guns per capita than their counterparts in Tucson, whose population is 33 times larger, Saunders said. In communities that scarcely have streets, the reservation has 26 documented street gangs, including Bloods and Crips, the police chief said.

“We're getting into pursuits, shootouts,” Saunders said.

Except for those living on or very near the border, the fence isn't a big issue yet with most tribal members, said Terrel Dew Johnson, co-director of the Tohono O'odham Community Action group.

“I've never heard anyone talking about it,” Johnson said.

Waitress Paxson takes it a step further.

“I wish the tribal elders would spend less time catering to the federal government and more time dealing with the needs of our people,” she said.

The federal government's plan for the fence looms large on the list of problems for Juan-Saunders.

“I did hear from (Homeland Security) officials that they will consult with the Tohono O'odham Nation as they move this forward,” she said. “I will take their word that they will.”

The Chief needs to decide which side of the fence he wants to live on.

Dixie

I heard someone on a talk radio show (can't remember who but doesn't matter) suggested they just build the fence up and around the reservation then.

How about we split the differenced here - build the wall and put in a portal/gateway on Reservation land for the people that belong to the Nation. This will enable them to travel back and forth, but will control the flow in from illegals.

I'm sure the Reservation police could patrol one portal more easily than 75 miles of open space.

I'm sure that there is some concern by the Nation's people about allowing the federal government onto their land. Understandably so!!!!! But this might work for both parties concerned.

Originally Posted by CheyenneWoman

How about we split the differenced here - build the wall and put in a portal/gateway on Reservation land for the people that belong to the Nation. This will enable them to travel back and forth, but will control the flow in from illegals.

I'm sure the Reservation police could patrol one portal more easily than 75 miles of open space.

I'm sure that there is some concern by the Nation's people about allowing the federal government onto their land. Understandably so!!!!! But this might work for both parties concerned.

Welcome back CheyenneWoman.
That is a most excellent idea!! Now who to tell?

I think planning it out carefully and then presenting it to the tribal elders would be the place to start. It would probably have to be another Indian Elder. How about Nitty - think he'd do it?

Why not pm him and see?

CheyenneWoman, it is so good to see you back here esp with such a good idea! I really don't think I would be the one to do that. I have no standing with my tribe except as a member, tribal card holder. It should really be someone who is higher up in my tribe or the tribe of another. I will tell you what I will do if you want. I will send this article, along with your suggestion to my assist chief. Mike Bailey of the Choctaw tribe and ask him if there is anything the Choctaw tribe might do to help garner a peaceful solution to this.I know people might get upset with the Tohono O'odham, tribe if they throw a monkey wrench into this fence on their land, I can understand their unwillingness to allow the Federal gov. onto their land. Mistrust of the Gov. and their dealings with Natives in general, goes all the way back to the first treaties our gov, made with the Natives then promptly broke as soon as it benefited them! This is something that is going to have to be done with great finese on the part of the Fed Gov. Everyone on here should think about this, we are concerned with the issue of our governments soverignty, we should also be aware the Native tribes each have their own sovereignty to maintain to them it is just as important to them. .I heard this question posed to Tom Tancredo on the video on the post here under I believe Border Wars, if anyone wants to go back and watch that, Tancredo said that should be no problem if they had to they could build the fence on the inside of the federal Gov's land. I myself like CheyennneWoman's idea better. CheyenneWoman, as you must know, women are highly respected in most Native tribes I know of, your idea is a brilliant one, I think you should try to make contact with the Tohono O'odham chief or asst. chief and tell them of your proposal, you should have the respect of that tribe at the very least for your solution to this problem. I will see what I can find out from my tribe in the next few days.I have 2 very crappy days facing me, Monday and Tuesday, then I will start checking this out. I have missed you CheyenneWoman, and just where is that bearpaw, she could be of use here to !

Nitty:

I'm just a woman with an idea - it would probably work in my tribe. But I'm sensitive to the fact that a woman from another tribe might be seen as "inappropriate".

I'll see if I can get any of my family members in the Cheyenne nation on board about this. You and I and bearpaw are, quite honestly, probably the only ones who understand how carefully this must be approached. Gently, and with great respect.

I'll send bearpaw an email and see if there's anything she can do.

Good luck on your end.

CheyenneWoman, never ever say you are just a woman, my friend! If we listened more to the ideas of WOMEN, the world would not be in the predictment we find ourselves in now, on the brink of a possible apocalypse . brought on by madmen drunk on power, in all corners of our world!


THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT I WOULD EVER VOTE FOR HILARY RODDEM CLINTON UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

You on the otherhand would have my vote!

Please do contact bearpaw, see what kind of input she might have.