American Indians fear US-Mexico border wall will destroy culture

EL PASO, Texas: To the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Indians, the water of the Rio Grande that divides the United States and Mexico sanctifies religious rites and purifies their hunts. Indian communities living miles away use the river to send messages to fellow tribes downstream, tribal chief Jose Sierra told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “They go to the river and talk to the river, and the river sends it down,” said Sierra, a barrel-chested man with long, greying hair and thick turquoise bracelets at his wrists. “They put messages in the river that come to us through the water.”

But now tribal leaders fear a proposed border wall as envisioned by US President Donald Trump will sever access to the river, spoiling traditions and ruining ancient culture. The Ysleta and more than two dozen American Indian tribes - designated by US law as sovereign nations governing themselves - live along the 3,060 km border with Mexico, with some vowing to fight the wall to defend tribal culture. Rene Lopez, a member of the Ysleta Traditional Council, said if the chief asked tribal members to knock down the wall, “we’ll do it. That’s how deeply it means to us.”

For while Trump and his supporters say a security wall is necessary to stop drug smuggling and illegal immigrants from Mexico, Indian leaders say otherwise. “Back off, Trump. Let us be,” said Sierra, whose ancestors settled in Texas in 1682 after being forced out of New Mexico during violent conflicts with Spanish settlers. But experts say the likelihood of stopping the wall with claims of Indian sovereignty or freedom of religion is unlikely, even though for some its impact could be dramatic.

Cut off from land

The Tohono O’odham people in southern Arizona live on a reservation that straddles the border and would be cut in two. “It would be just devastating,” said Verlon Jose, vice chairman of the Tohono O’odham, told the Foundation. “Walls are not the answer to the issues that we face ... Walls have never solved problems, whether that’s in terms of immigration, in terms of militarization.” Border security could be boosted with more hi-tech tower systems that provide longrange surveillance, tracking and detection and by immigration reform allowing more migrants to work temporarily in the United States without having to sneak in, Jose said.

Native people globally have been blocked from sacred grounds, burial places and ancestral migration routes by borders and walls, said Christopher McLeod, director of the California-based Sacred Land Film Project who has documented sacred sites. A study by US geographer Reece Jones from the University of Hawaii found that in 1990 there were 15 border walls in the world - but now there are almost 70. “When people are cut off from their land, from their sacred lands and their ceremonies, then the culture dies. Their spiritual vitality is weakened,” McLeod told the Foundation. “A border and a wall are not just symbols. They’re very physical insults.” —Reuters