A challenge to censorship at the border

It couldn't be easier to write about, even for armchair journalists. They can even copy the powerful written testimony of the Mohawk Women Title Holders from the statement, and copy the final report, since both are online.

Perhaps the recorded audio testimony of Mike Wilson, Tohono O'odham, Kahentinetha Horn, Mohawk, and Margo Tamez, Lipan Apache, to mention just three, is too powerful and controversial for newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

It is far easier for the mainstream media to be caught up in the xenophobia and racism, duped by fear and false spins, and take a formula approach to reporting on the borders.

It is far easier for editors and writers to avoid the fact that traditional Indian people and spiritual leaders in the United States and Canada say their elected tribal councils and band councils are "puppet governments," fashioned after the governments of the invaders.

Those puppet councils were designed in the early Twentieth Century to sign energy leases and are now co-opted by Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to oppress Indigenous Peoples at the border, according to Native people. At the same time, private prison corporations and the gate builders and gate keepers are making fortunes.

Those corporations are not just US corporations either at the border. Israel's defense contractor Elbit Systems (among the builders of the Apartheid Wall in Palestine) was subcontracted by Boeing to construct security at the US/Mexico border. The Wackenhut buses waiting to be filled with migrants at the border are owned by G4S Global Security, with headquarters in England and Denmark. All the while, Blackwater is waiting at the border, hired guns waiting for a contract.

Meanwhile, some of the mainstream media has finally realized that all federal laws, including those protecting American Indian burial places and those protecting endangered species, have been voided at the US/Mexico border to build the border wall. Homeland Security, using the Real ID Act, has overruled federal law and US courts, deeming itself more powerful than US laws or US courts.

Now, that the Lipan Apache elderly and women in Texas are under attack by Homeland Security and  the Border Patrol, maybe the censorship by the media and complicity of the border wall builders will be shaken.

Still, there are heroes to celebrate. Many of those heroes were at the Indigenous Peoples' Border Summit of the Americas.

Photos and reports at:
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/