Border wall tyranny: Lipan Apache in Texas issue cry for help

The harassment and intimidation of women, children and elderly comes as the Indigenous Peoples' Border Summit of the Americas concluded on Tohono O'odham land in Arizona.

On O'odham land, the border wall has already resulted in the ancestors of the Tohono O'odham being dug up. Further, the border wall on O'odham land will be a physical barrier to the ceremonies.

All federal laws have been rendered powerless by Homeland Security using the Read ID Act, including federal laws protecting Indian remains and repatriation. Further the laws protecting endangered species, including the Sonoran Pronghorn, jaguar and others along the Arizona border have been voided.

As all federal laws are dismantled, private prison corporations are seizing the profits from  imprisoning migrants, including the imprisonment of infants and children at the T. Don Hutto Detention Center near Austin.

A delegation of Mohawks urged Indigenous Peoples to rise up and tear down the border wall and halt the arrests and deaths of their fellow Indigenous brothers and sisters being displaced by so-called free trade agreements, paramilitaries and brutal land seizures in the south.

As the Lipan Apaches' call goes out across the Americas, many are rising up, ready to resist the tyranny.

From Margo Tamez:

Urgent call for help: Homeland Security attempting seizure of Lipan Apache lands, Texas.

Subject: el Calaboz, Land Grant Indigenous communities, South Texas--Tamaulipas (Nuevo Santander rancheria), Mexico-US International Boundary, Militarized Zone.

Lipan Apache Descent Land Title Holders Threatened by Homeland National Security Agency, National Guard and Border Patrol

Hello friends,

I am informing you of recent events in my maternal community of el Calaboz, Texas, a binational land grant indigenous rancheria of Lipan Apache, Chiricahua and Basque descent.

I am foregrounding this because I have been asked to submit documentation through the NGO, the International Indigenous Treaty Council, for the CERD investigation of human rights and indigenous rights abuses by the U.S. government against my mother community.

The Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) report to be directed toward the United Nation in March 2008, which will for the first time in over a decade focus on abuses by the United States to oppressed groups.

This year, as a result of the recently approved UN Declaration of Indigenous Peoples rights, indigenous people have a specific opportunity to submit documents on behalf of their communities.

I'll be working hard the next week to complete a draft document, with evidentiary materials, for review by an international human rights and indigenous rights attorney who recently accompanied me on an investigatory field trip to my paternal community, Redford, TX, of the Jumano Apache.

I wanted to keep you informed of this progress, and through this following letter, establish a way to communicate what I'm doing and how it impacts all my work. See the earlier letter below.

-Ahi'i'eMargo Tamez

Subject: Emergency in el Calaboz, Lipan Apache & Basque-Indigena North American Land Title Holders!!!

Dear relatives,

I wish I was writing under better circumstances, but I must be fast and direct.

My mother and elders of El Calaboz, since July have been the targets of numerous threats and harassments by the Border Patrol, Army Corps of Engineers, NSA, and the U.S. related to the proposed building of a fence on their levee.

Since July, they have been the targets of numerous telephone calls, unexpected and uninvited visits on their lands, informing them that they will have to relinquish parts of their land grant holdings to the border fence buildup. The NSA demands that elders give up their lands to build the levee, and further, that they travel a distance of 3 miles, to go through checkpoints, to walk, recreate, and to farm and herd goats and cattle, ON THEIR OWN LANDS.

This threat against indigenous people, life ways and lands has been very very serious and stress inducing to local leaders, such as Dr. Eloisa Garcia Tamez, who has been in isolation from the larger indigenous rights community due to the invisibility of indigenous people of South Texas and Northern Tamaulipas to the larger social justice conversation regarding the border issues.

However recent events, of the last 5 days cause us to feel that we are in urgent need of immediate human rights observers in the area, deployed by all who can help as soon as possible--immediate relief.

My mother informed me, as I got back into cell range out of Redford, TX, on Monday, November 13, that Army Corps of Engineers, Border Patrol and National Security Agency teams have been going house to house, and calling on her personal office phone, her cell phone and in other venues, tracking down and enclosing upon the people and telling them that they have no other choice in this matter. They are telling elders and other vulnerable people that "the wall is going on these lands whether you like it or not, and you have to sell your land to the U.S."

My mother, Eloisa Garcia Tamez, Lipan Apache (descendant of Mexican Chiricahua descent elder, Aniceto Garcia, who gave her traditional indigenous birth welcoming ceremony and lightning ceremony), is resisting the forced occupation with firm resistance. She has already had two major confrontations with NSA since July--one in her office at the University of Texas at Brownsville, where she is the Director of a Nursing Program and where she conducts research on diabetes among indigenous people of the MX-US binational region of South Texas and Tamaulipas.

She reports that some land owners in the rancheria area of El Calaboz, La Paloma and El Ranchito, under pressure to sell to the U.S. without prior and informed consent, have already signed over their lands, due to their ongoing state of impoverishment and exploitation in the area under colonization, corporatism, NAFTA and militarization.

This is an outrage, but more, this is a significant violation of United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People, recently ratified and accepted by all UN nations, except the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Furthermore, it is a violation of the United Nations CERD, Committee on Elimination of Racism and Racial Discrimination.

My mother is under great stress and crisis, unknowing if the Army soldiers and the NSA agents will be forcibly demanding that she sign documents. She reports that they are calling her at all hours, seven days a week. She has firmly told them not to call her anymore, nor to call her at all hours of the night and day, nor to call on the weekends any further.She asked them to meet with her in a public space and to tell their supervisors to come.They refuse to do so. Instead, they continue to harass and intimidate.

At this time, due to the great stress the elders are currently under, communicated to me, because they are being demanded under covert tactics, to relinquish indigenous lands, I feel that I MUST call upon my relatives, friends, colleagues, especially associates in Texas within driving distance to the Rio Grande valley region, and involved in indigenous rights issues, to come forth and aid us.

Please! Please help indigenous women land title holders resisting forced occupation in their own lands! Please do not hesitate to forward this to people in your own networks in media, journalism, social and environmental justice, human rights, indigenous rights advocacy and public health watch groups!

Margo Tamez
mtamez@wsu.edu

Jumano Apache West Texas-Chihuahua Lipan Apache South Texas-Tamaulipas, Apacheria Nuevo Santander Land Grant--Basque Colony)
http://www.nativewiki.org/Margo_Tamez

Listen to Margo Tamez' report at the Indigenous Border Summit, on women and children at the border, day three:
http://www.earthcycles.net/

More articles on the Indigenous Border Summit and border wall: Click here