TOHONO O'ODHAM NATION (CN) — Seven miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, in a wellness center in San Miguel village, Tohono O’odham Indians gather to exercise and, lately, to talk about the wall that President Donald Trump wants to build across 75 miles of reservation land.
“Pretty much everybody that I’ve talked to is against it,” said Joshua Garcia, the center’s health education specialist. “It’s just not right to have a wall there.”
For the Tohono O’odham, or Desert People, who have lived since time immemorial in this remote corner of the country’s second-largest Indian reservation, a border wall between them and the tribal members who happen to live in Mexico would be an affront to tribal sovereignty.
Leaders of the Tohono O’odham made their opposition to the wall official in a Feb. 7 resolution. Leaders have traveled to Washington, D.C. to seek support for their cause, and released a video, “There is no O’odham word for wall,” that details their stance.
“We believe that what is effective is continued cooperation and working together,” said Verlon Jose, vice chairman of the Tribal Council.
Tribal leaders have given their blessing to integrated fixed towers with radar and day and night cameras that soon will be installed on the reservation. But Jose and other council members say a wall would exacerbate the separation of tribal members already divided by a boundary, and hurt their culture and environment.
“Every stick and stone is sacred,” Jose said. “Every creature is sacred. Every creature has a significant part in our way of life.” With 2.8 million acres on the main reservation, the Tohono O’odham land is more than four times as big as Rhode Island, more than twice as big as Delaware. They are the only U.S. tribe that was never at war with the federal government and never ejected from their main homeland.
But their way of life has been deeply disrupted over the years. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 demarcated the border that geographically split the tribe in two, causing myriad problems for the back-and-forth traveling of members. About 34,000 now live in the United States, another 2,000 in Mexico.
Eventually, as drug trafficking and illegal immigration into the country rose, the area where the Tohono O’odham once roamed free became a battlefield for smugglers and the federal government.
Tribal members were caught in the crossfire. Living on the nation has brought harassment from both agents and smugglers.
“The whole drug war – and now the war on terrorism – has really been a war on the O’odham,” said Robert Wiliams, a professor at the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program.
Whether Trump through executive orders on immigration can legally build a wall on the tribal land is unclear, but Williams said that changes made to federal law in the name of border security give the government significant latitude.
“Congress has given the Department of Homeland Security wide authority to do whatever they want,” he said. “I think that’s what the nation’s concerned about.”
San Miguel Village
Inside the San Miguel wellness center, Garcia stands over a stove in the small kitchen, cooking a rib-eye steak he will eat with kale and avocado for lunch.