INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE & GOVERNANCE RECOVERY

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Sunday, October 31, 2010

TESTIFY PROJECT: U.S. ABUSES AND VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Testify Project
"It is time for people in the United States to make their voices heard at the United Nations. The Testify Project collects stories of injustice from throughout the United States through one-minute video and one-page written testimony. The top videos and stories will be screened for United Nations delegates in Geneva, Switzerland during the United States’ Universal Periodic Review.

CORE QUESTION: How are human rights violated in your community? OPTIONAL QUESTION: What should the US Government do to protect these rights?

Videos and written testimony should tell us about human rights violations in your community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) specifies many rights everyone has simply by being human, such as the right to life, liberty and security of person (Article 3), freedom from arbitrary arrest (Article 9), freedom of thought and religion (Article 18), right to form and join unions (Article 23) and right to an adequate standard of living (Article 25). You can read a full version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=eng, or a simplified version at www.adcq.qld.gov.au/pubs/UDHR_easyrefguide.rtf.

GET INVOLVED AND ORGANIZE! For more instructions about how to write, submit written statements, and/or how to make a youtube video and upload it to the Testify Project, click!

ORIGINARIOS, INDIGENOUS, FIRST NATION, PUEBLOS INDIGENAS, COMUNIDADES TRADICIONALES, BANDAS LIPANES, BANDAS TLAXCALTECAS ANCIANOS, INMIGRANTES INDIGENAS Y CAMPESINOS, PEOPLES OF LOWER RIO GRANDE VALLEY IMPACTED BY THE BORDER WALL, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE HORRIFIC EFFECTS OF FLOODING, LOSS OF LIVELIHOOD, RACIST, SEXIST, CLASSIST DISCRIMINATION BY GOVERNMENT AND LOCAL AUTHORITY, AND ON-GOING IMPACTS OF THE MILITARIZATION OF THE COMMUNITY: Lipan Apache Women Defense calls upon you.

PLEASE--if you desire to walk side by side and in ALLIANCE with Indigenous Peoples working on human rights and Indigenous Rights based upon the local community protocols of governance, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as key frameworks for strengthened and empowered communities, the dismantling of the Border Wall, the return of Indigenous lands, and return of Indigenous local authority and vision for sustainable communities: CONTACT US! sumalhepa.nde.defense@gmail.com

Thursday, October 28, 2010

NATIVE PEOPLES & ARIZONA SB1070



The American Indian Program at Cornell University presents a Roundtable Discussion on Arizona SB1070 and its impacts on Native Peoples.

Date: Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Place: Goldwin Smith Hall, Room 142
Time: 4:30-6:00 p.m.

Light Refreshments to follow.

Panelists:

Dr. Margo Tamez (Lipan Apache) – Assistant Professor and Faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies and Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia, Department of Community, Culture & Global Studies. Her research areas include the Indigenous peoples and Indigenous women from the regions currently bifurcated by the U.S.-Mexico border, and decolonial Indigenous historical perspectives of Nde’ and Nnee’ (‘Apache’) peoples of the Texas-Mexico border region.

Michael Flores (Tohono O’odham from GuVo) – Community organizer in border communities in and near Arizona. He has served three terms on his Tribal Council, and as a Board Member of the International Indian Treaty Council.

Dr. Alan Eladio Gómez (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) - Historian and Assistant Professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University. He writes about the history of social movements in Mexico, the U.S. and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands; and the political cultures of U.S./Third World Left radicalism.

Facilitator:
Dr. Verónica Martínez-Matsuda (PhD in Borderlands/U.S. History, University of Texas at Austin)– Visiting Professor in Cornell ILR. She has held fellowship positions at Bryn Mawr College, Rhodes College, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Her current research examines the role of the Migratory Labor Camp Program, established and managed by the U.S. Government during the late 1930s and early 1940s, in the lives of migrant farm worker families.

Co-sponsors: ILR International and Comparative Labor Department; ILR Labor Relations, Law, and History Department; Latino Studies Program; Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies research group; and Wells College Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

LAW Defense Statement to the U.S. Social Forum

STATEMENT OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER,
LOWER RIO GRANDE RIVER, EL CALABOZ RANCHERÍA,
TO THE U.S. SOCIAL FORUM (2010) REPRESENTATIVES
Greetings!
The Lipan Apache Women Defense (LAW-Defense), an Indigenous Peoples Organization (IPO), established in 2007, and a Texas-Mexico border human rights working group, co-founded by Eloisa Garcia Tamez and Margo Tamez, is located in the heartland of Nde' shimaa hada'didla ('lands of the lightning people clans), in El Calaboz Rancheria. We exercise the right to pursue all the venues available and to create new ones for the application of customary laws of Indigenous peoples, human rights and international law, and the United Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
LAW-Defense welcomes and invites partnerships to work productively for Indigenous Peoples‟ pursuit of “self-determination, land and natural resources, cultural rights and sacred sites protection, subsistence, Treaty rights, health and social services, non-discrimination, environmental protection, education, language, and many others which Indigenous Peoples identified as essential to their dignity, survival and well-being.”1
At this time, LAW-Defense calls upon our sisters and brothers participating in the 2010 U.S. Social Forum to join us in the sustained interrogation of the human rights violations committed by the United States of America along the Texas-Mexico border in its construction of an 18 foot tall steel, concrete reinforced wall across Indigenous Peoples lands.
LAW-Defense calls upon the U.S. Social Forum participants to support the self-determination processes of the diverse Indigenous communities who are directly impacted and irreparably harmed by the U.S. border wall construction which unfolded, between 2006-2009 in community-held lands.
We call upon you to work productively and in partnership to articulate this year, at the 2010 U.S. Social Forum, the multiple ways in which the U.S.-Mexico border militarization and the Texas-Mexico border wall impacts workers, families, women, children, elders, the sick, rural agrarian societies, subsistence societies, family-based livelihoods, traditional trade and commerce, biodiversity, traditional stewardship of sacred sites and natural resources, the dissemination of both traditional and contemporary knowledge systems, and the human rights of Indigenous peoples with Aboriginal Title across the vast region. (Articles 20 and 21, UNDRIP)

Read full statement here

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective: Indigenous Perspectives & Principles on Arizona SB 1070











On Tuesday, April 27, 2010, the O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective (OSABC) provided critical and incisive analysis about SB 1070 from Indigenous Peoples impacted directly. A youth movement with tangible roots connected to the larger human rights and Indigenous rights social movements across the U.S.-Mexico border region led by Native American and Pueblos Indigenas, OSABC is leading a vibrant challenge to the privileges of the settler colonial power structure across North America.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

COMMENTARY: UNITED NATIONS PERMANENT FORUM ON INDIGENOUS ISSUES (UNPFII), 2010

From April 19 through April 30, 2010, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues will be in session.

Statements (interventions) submitted to the Permanent Forum are available here. And, this service is provided by doCip (Indigenous Peoples' Center for Documentation, Research and Information.)

Access to the UNPFII is quite difficult for the common Indigenous peoples--from regional and national meetings (where agendas are established and set)to transnational meetings (where hemispheric understandings are shaped) to the annual UNPFII session (where Indigenous delegates shape the 'voice' of Indigenous communities.

The politics of access continue to incise and sculpt the disparities and unbalance reflected in Indigenous self-determination movements, and at times gloss over how much at odds community-level analysis differs from elites' articulations of 'crisis.' While 'self-determination' and 'sovereignty' continue to be defined through normative Western political-science frameworks within U.N. realms, the lack of will by Indigenous delegates to challenge 'sovereignty' as an artifact of Western thought and to determine frameworks that disrupt normative sovereignty is nowhere to be seen in this year's opening statements.

Indigenous communities defending themselves against intensified violence and the use of violence by states, nations and nations-within-nations (the Indigenous polity) is hyperperipheralized, again.

The use of normative sovereignty to evade the ways in which 'sovereignty' is used daily as an umbrella to glaze over the ways in which--locally, regionally, nationally, and globally--Indigenous polities are not innocent of their enmeshments with the state, and not innocent of the use of this legal platform to exert violence against their own--is marginalized. And, this is crucial because most indigenous peoples experience violence intimately, in their closest environs--where the Indigenous polity of the household, community center, council, is entangled with the violence of the state.

Indigenous communities challenging deep militarization--at the bordered peripheries of the 'core', are increasingly pushing back on the tightening of the fist around the throat of their communities by oligarchical polities and challenging this across entire regions (comprised of both non-Indigenous and Indigenous leadership). The communiites experiencing physical, economic, and penetrating psychological violence as a result of violent dispossessions, displacements, and persecutions through the apparatus of the state working with and through the nation-within-the-nation sort of violence absolutely threaten the ideation that Indigenous sovereignty is utopic and unscathed. The voices from below are indicators that 'Indigenous sovereignty' and its discontents--must be allowed open debate, and put up for scrutiny if true self-determination and autonomy will ever gain traction among the common people--who are at best skeptical of the UNPFII larger impact on the Indigenous peoples from below.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Restoring Lipan Apache Women's Laws, Lands, and Strength in El Calaboz Rancheria at the Texas-Mexico Border

Published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2010, vol. 35, no. 3, The University of Chicago.
Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms

Abstract: Ndé gową goshjaa (Lipan Apache families or clan relations) produce a significant portion of indigenous alliances and resistances to imperialism, colonization, industrialization, and militarization in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. The visibility of Ndé isdzáné (Lipan Apache women) in the Lower Rio Grande Valley changed radically after the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006. In this essay, I speak from my position as one of the cofounders of the Lipan Apache Women Defense and as the third‐born daughter of vocal and consistent leaders of the reemergent Ndé isdzáné in the traditional territories of the Ndé. My analysis is not meant to substitute for the important analysis of local matrilineal leaders, nor is it meant to be static. Rather, as an Ndé isdzáné scholar, I must allow the space to make and to know the people, politics, histories, events, and meanings as they continue to unfold. I believe that Ndé isdzáné, as a basis for Ndé activism (which includes supportive brothers) and as a category of analysis, furthers the work of feminism in U.S., North American, indigenous, and global indigenous human rights defense work. Investigating the histories of our indigenous foremothers—respecting and acknowledging community‐based rights, wishes, and aspirations—challenges Ndé women and our allies to reflect on the rights work of contemporary indigenous women in militarized and state‐occupied policing zones and their roles and challenges as political actors in extreme struggles against economic enslavement, dispossession, land theft, vital resource deprivation, environmental destruction, detention, rape, racialized sexism, indentured servitude, and casta.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Indigenous Elders Singled Out for New Round of Federal Condemnations on Texas-Mexico Border





January 5, 2010





Contacts:
Eloisa García Támez: Eloisa.Tamez1@gmail.com
Margo Tamez, sumalhepa.nde.defense@gmail.com


For Immediate Release

Lipan Apaches, Támez-Benavidez Stronghold on Texas-Mexico Border
Singled Out for New Round of Federal Condemnations


Feds Want More Land to Put 'Holes' in Border Wall for Commercial Users:
Native American & Traditional Peoples' Lands Targeted for Surveys



Recently, a communication from a spokesperson from the Office of Congressional Affairs, Customs and Border Protection to the Office of Congressman Solomon P. Ortiz stated, "We have not yet made a decision on whether to take any of Dr. Tamez’s land. If there is another way to allow other landowners access, we will try to accomplish it in that way; however, we haven’t yet identified another way.”

Eloisa Támez and her elderly relative, (Sr. Benavidez), have an active lawsuit against the United States and the Texas-Mexico Border Wall, which, last April 2009, sealed off the Indigenous and Traditional Peoples of El Calaboz from their lands, culture, and livelihoods on the south side of the wall. Tamez and Benavidez, who challenged the U.S. in a class action law suit, are currently awaiting notification of the new date of their 'compensation' jury trial, which has been postponed more than three times.

The extensively documented case, Eloisa G. Tamez, et al. Civil Action No.: 1:08-CV-0004 (United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas (Brownsville Division), has opened up new conceptual grounds about the contemporary challenges of states’ rights and human rights, and where these intersect with Indigenous peoples' rights to culture, environments, livelihoods, traditional ways of life and Peoplehood.

The lands in contestation have been held in continuity by Indigenous peoples prior to the Spanish colonization of northeast Mexico and Texas, and in 1749 were granted to the ancestors of Tamez and Benavidez. European legal traditions of granting lands collectively and individually to Native Americans has origins in 1526, when Hernán Cortéz granted encomiendas and hidalgos to Nahua and Tlaxcalteca peoples.

The tradition of granting lands to Indigenous peoples throughout Mexico’s northern states and the U.S. Southwest is a complex and entangled legal history between Native Americans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and the States, and often involving heated contestation when Native American rights to exist and to practice their laws, religions, and traditional organization are denied and threatened by the State em>especially when mega-development is an issue. In a previously published article, the Lipan Apache Women Defense has demonstrated that militarization, militarism, border walls, security technology, war contractors and dispossessing Indigenous peoples is big development for U.S.-based contractors. See 'Resources', below.

In the recent notification by the U.S. to Támez, it appears the U.S. government is considering the possibility of condemning more of her lands if she does not provide them entry to conduct more surveys. According to Cylke, the U.S. is seeking entry to “cure access” for land owners requesting commercial access to the levee and their lands on the south of the wall. Tamez, however, challenges this logic. “While it is true that access to the south side of the wall is important for many landowners, it is not rational that the government needs to possess more land on the levee—or beneath it—in order to open a hole in the wall. All they have to do is remove portions of what they constructed, not condemn more land to do so. The government is not being transparent. Condemn more lands to open the wall? Something is not right. I am refusing to allow them entry to my property for the 12 months they requested. If they want to open the wall, they should do so; the people need access to the titled lands on the south of the levee for their subsistence and livelihoods. However, the government should not require dispossessing individuals any further for that access to occur. The government and the contractors are targeting the Indigenous elders who have been most vocal in the exposure of the corruption which is at the foundation of the wall's construction. They are targeting us as a specific group. The government recently dismantled a large section of the wall down the road from El Calaboz at a locally well-known agricultural business. We feel at this time, given the history of this case and the history of non-transparency in all matters regarding the border wall construction, that we must stand firm.”

According to Margo Tamez, a Lipan Apache scholar at Washington State University, the U.S. may not have the final say if the Indigenous peoples are successful in gaining the ear of the Inter-American Commission/Organization of American States.

In October 2008, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of the American States (OAS) held its 133rd regular period of sessions. In this period, the IACHR/OAS read briefs and listened to testimony of the University of Texas Law Working Group, comprised of faculty and law students of the University of Texas Law School, with Margo Tamez, an impacted community member. In their formal statement, the IACHR/OAS Jurists responded: "The Commission received troubling information about the impact that the construction of a wall in Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico border, has on the human rights of area residents, in particular its discriminatory effects. The information received indicates that its construction would disproportionally affect people who are poor, with a low level of education, and generally of Mexican descent, as well as indigenous communities on both sides of the border."
(Available at: http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/borderwall/analysis/iac-Press-Release-re-Hearing.pdf).

Texas-Mexico IAS/OAS Testimony at: http://lipanapachecommunitydefense.blogspot.com/2008/10/texas-mexico-border-wall-hearing-at.html.

Indigenous peoples along the Texas-Mexico border—more than many other impacted groups—are burdened in multiple ways and disproportionately on all border wall construction projects because their communities have already been consistently targeted for State violence, militarization, repression and dispossession as a matter of the normative policies of the neo-liberal and settler State.

The ‘third world’ conditions of the Texas border communities are directly related to the structural violence which goes hand-in-hand with the the settler state and settler constitutionalism dominating the region’s violent race, gender, and class politics. The normalization of the Texas-Mexico border communities as 'sacrifice zones' is so deeply internalized within the consciousness of South Texas' white citizenry that the scale of the violence and injustice is invisible to them.

Many historians have anayzed Texas as a unique case in North American histories of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and the entrenched pockets of cultures of violence which sustain the creed of lawlessness. The idealogy of hatred which birthed the settler society and spawned South Texas' industrial corridors as the 'gateway' to Latin America is, as historian Gary Clayton Anderson stated, a culture where "Violence, especially against ethnic groups, had become economically institutionalized in Texas." In this cultural landscape, the promotion of lawlessness, turmoil, and opportunity collide, and 'South Texas', from Indigenous perspectives, was constructed as an excuse to develop, destroy and kill.

Tragically, today this consciousness has not evolved. Violence has become, as Anderson argues, "ingrained in Texas, especially in the southern counties." As in the past, today South Texas violence is laissez faire andfixed in an opportunistic manner--among governors, corporations, contractors, workers, congresspersons, commissioners, rangers, border patrols, and civil society.

Indigenous peoples along the Texas border were already under extreme deprivation before the border wall--at alarming scales and at comparitive levels with many Third World nations and militarized conflict zones around the world. Fernando Romero-Lar cross-analyzed this border with the world's top conflict zones: North Korea-South Korea; Israel and Palestine; Morocco and Spain; South Africa; and the Golden Triangle. Romero-Lar found that this border topped the list of all conflict-industrial global militarized borders to qualify as a 'hyper-border.' (See report: "Texas Borderlands: Frontier of the Future (2009)")

The fundamental rights of Indigenous peoples are distorted in the normative Texas Creation Myth which traditionally views Indigenous peoples as less than human, servants, laborers, and 'the multitudes of surplus workers.' This construction of Indigenous peoples as 'Other' is a popularized stereotype which contorts white heroic masculinity through rationalized acts of genocide, extermination and structural violence against South & West Texas' and northern Mexico's aboriginal inhabitants.

Indigenous peoples' precarious access to critical First Foods (necessary for the repair of their dietary health), safe and potable water, safe housing, healthcare, education, jobs, transportation, and an environment free of gender violence and militarization has been overshadowed by the general society's pre-occupation with 'security' thinly masking the development objectives of NAFTA, the Security and Prosperity Partnership, and ongoing projects of the lucrative corporate war occupation to militarize our environments. Indigenous elders, while they contend with degrading and destructive harrassment and surveillance upon them as they go about their personal lives, cannot help but speak out against the erosion of rule of law and human rights as a daily reality in South Texas.

The occupied aspects of their lives is anything but natural--militarized occupation in South Texas and northern Mexico, funded with U.S. tax dollars, Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, is socially and physically constructed by a Euro-American settler society which emigrated to the Texas border in the mid 19th century. Massive waves of Euro-ethnic emigrants and Anglos from the U.S. south appropriated Texas constitutionalized slavery as a normalized economic system of an expansion-prone, modernizing society. At its essence and most fundamental level, Texas embodies the principles of Liberal democracy and settler constitutionalism--based on a stratified society where Indigenous peoples, such as Apaches, Tlaxcaltecas, Coahuiltecs, Tiguas, Kikapoos, and Comanches, are viewed as 'enemies,' and exploitable as human battery packs energizing the dreamscape of the middle-class consumer.

Along the U.S. side of the Texas-Mexico border, the flavor of white America is most palpable on a one-on-one and up-close basis, as the Indigenous peoples witness, report and document their most fundamental human rights being further eroded. When they are not being followed by gangs of CBP patrol cars, U.S. helicopters, and government functionaries trampling through their lands unannounced, they are confronted with the new migrant workers imported to the region to consume the manly job of building the border wall.



With the new waves of Angl-American emigrants from states such as Nebraska and those incomes going out of state to households in the Mid-West, it seems as though the border wall is truly an import-export job. When the border wall was being constructed in Cameron County, community members reported that the increase in large vehicle (i.e. trucks) traffic on Hwy 281/Military Highway bearing license plates with NEBRASKA engraved upon them was obvious and noticeable. Government contractors tend to be loyal to their home districts and states, and Euro-American migrant workers from Nebraska importing a conspicuously Mid-Western consciousness of 'Indians' and 'Mexicans, i.e. savages/illegals' could be felt in the road and table manners of the Nebraska migrant workers exercising both militaristic and tourist-like behaviors with local Indigenous women--both on roads and restaurants, according to local witnesses. It seemed as though the daily work to build the wall included a conscious opportunistic will to exercise old-fashioned American masculinity and sexism upon the Indigenous women labor force.



Local communities are exposed daily to these ruptures and multiple others in their daily lives, from the perniciously benign forces of white privilege and racism to the most obvious obstructions to human rights of the wall itself. They bear witness to the criminality, dangerous behaviors, greed and thievery of the mega-wealthy--which is ironic--considering that the U.S. citizenry just endured one of the most severe economic depressions in a century.

These fixtures of violence in the heart of darkness continues to define and to mark Texas as a pernicious state within an outlaw State; an identity with a propensity for achieving 'public goals' exercised 'democratically' through violence against Indigenous peoples. In the whitestream, this violence generally goes unaddressed by the state, federal governments and U.S. civil society (who'd rather stay 'safe' in the boundaries of debating the progressiveness of 'Avatar' rather than hone in on the current ethnocides in the U.S. 'Congo'--South Texas.

This violent and negligent will to empire, from the perspective of many Indigenous elders along the Texas-Mexico border, must then be taken up at different levels of legal oversite. They are resolved that they will not be intimidated by the violent propensities of the settler society for Indigenous land, water, minerals and bodies which are the markers of mega-projects.

Mega-projects--such as the border wall--impede the Indigenous elders from accessing their ancestral medicine plants, their biologically diverse properties titled to their ancestors through Crown land grants and treaties, and their sacred burial sites such as cemeteries which align both sides of the border wall. Indigenous peoples’ genealogical ties to historical places along the border wall construction, such as rancherias, communal meeting places, religious sites, missions, pueblos, presidios, wildlife areas, and traditional subsistence areas throughout the Texas-Mexico border region are eroding every day as a result of the lack of access to the lands on the south side of the wall which are owned by Indigenous peoples.

Eloisa Támez, a vocal opponent to the wall, seeks secure and unharmed access to her lands on the south side of the wall. Támez has documented numerous important species of flora and fauna on her lands necessary for continuity of culture, and she watches over the sites of habitation of her ancestors due to the destructive methods of government contractors who destroyed portions of her properties vegetation during the construction of the wall. The Lipan Apaches, like the Kickapoo, Tigua, and numerous tribes in Arizona, argue that the racist politics which are the foundation of the border wall must be calculated as “irreparable damage.” She does not believe that the government’s new request for “curing access” should entail dispossessing her elders and her community from Indigenous rights and the protection of their human rights. The federal lawsuit documented the ancestral, genealogical ties of Tamez and Benavidez, and an important South Texas Lipan Apache band in the region, which are signatories on key treaties, accords, hidalgos, merceds and land grants with Spain, Mexico, Texas and the United States.

Margo Tamez, a scholar at Washington State University, notes, “By refusing this community’s requests for secure access to their lands and cultural properties—which are necessary to sustain their traditional subsistence vis-à-vis agrarian, pastoral livelihoods, traditional gatherings and religious practices— the U.S. is failing to protect their human rights under International Law. Negative consequences may be associated with the failure to do so.”

Eloisa Tamez, a strong proponent of the health of poor and traditional peoples of her community, restates her firm resolve. “The health of our elders is severely threatened by this singling out of our small community—and our elders—in El Calaboz and the possibility of further dispossession.” Numerous experts debating and writing about this case agree that the border wall mega-project and continuous dispossessions against numerous traditional and poor communities disproportionately targets the most vulnerable. Texas’ border counties are the poorest in the nation. The wall currently stands on the #1 and #2 most impoverished counties in the entire U.S., according to the last five years census reports. Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Presidio counties are often analyzed and cross-compared to many developing nations--globally.

Margo Tamez, who is also the founder of an Indigenous Peoples Organization at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, concurs with the community members. “We feel that Indigenous peoples’ human rights are being violated—and this serious concern explicitly involves the United States and state government representatives along the entire U.S.-Mexico border—on both sides of the border. Lipan Apaches have demonstrated their serious grievances against the violation of their human rights along with other Apache nations (San Carlos Apache Tribe) at the United Nations in the past two years. The international law forums are increasingly critical sites for Indigenous peoples divided by this border to seek out alternative partners, allies, and legal avenues to pursue reparations and their human rights against States which are violators.”

At the local level, the singling out of Indigenous elders is causing further injury and irreparable harm against future existences of Lipan Apaches and Traditional Peoples in the El Calaboz Ranchería. Their lifeways are threatened, and thus, so are Lipan Apache grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Indigenous children’s rights are increasingly taking on important visibility at the United Nations, where the U.S. has been taken to task for numerous violations against Indigenous children who live and work within its political borders. Eloisa Támez, in her on-going challenge to dispossession, is taking a firm stand for the rights of Indigenous children. She states, “This is for the children—ours and everyone’s. The government is possibly seeking to take possessory rights to the Earth beneath the levee. My grandparents would not have allowed that, and they actively fought against this in their time. This is an on-going struggle for Indigenous peoples. Those land cannot be taken from the Indigenous peoples, according to traditional beliefs. The Earth is not for taking."


Resources:

Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875, (Normal: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005).

The University of Texas at Austin, School of Law & The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, "The Texas-Mexico Border Wall," at http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/borderwall/law/lawsuits-government.html.

Fernando Romero/Lar, Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and Its Future, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

Margo Tamez, "The Texas-Mexico Border Wall Through the Eyes of Indigenous Communities in El Calaboz Rancheria," May 2008.
Excerpt:
The following is a list of corporate contractors involved in the building of the
Border wall in S. Texas.

Lockheed Martin
Texas Divisions of Raytheon (Network Centric Systems)
L-C Communications (Integrated Systems)
Northrup Grumman (Los Angeles, CA)
BAE Systems (Austin, TX)
SAIC of San Diego
Computer Sciences Corp of El Segundo, CA
America’s Border Security Group (Erriccson Inc, Plano, TX)
(NASDAQ: ERIKY)
Fluor Corporation (NYSEL:FLR)
SYColeman Corporation
MTC Technologies
CAMBER Corporation
AEP Networks, Inc.
Texas A & M University
University of Texas (Austin)
Boeing
Kellogg Brown & Root (Halliburton)
Secure Border Initiative Network
United Kingdom Home Office


Sources for the above:
PennWell. “Defense firms turn to border security.” Washington, 28, Dec. 2005.
“The government’s high-profile offensive to control the borders is spawning a growth market for the nations’s defense industry.” http://mae.pannet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=244491&p=32 Accessed 11/20/07.

AEP Networks, America’s Border Security Group. “Ericcson’s AMerioca Border Security Group (ABSG) Offers Proven Effective Solution for U.S. Border Security.” http://www.aepnetworks.com/news/press_archive/release_06012006.htm
Accessed 11/20/07.

Richey, Joseph. “Fencingthe Border: Boeing’s High-Tech Plan Falters.” July 9, 2007http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14552. Accessed 11/20/07.;

“Software Glitches Delay Virtual Border Fence.” Newsmax.com. Tuesday, Ocotober 30, 2007. http://www.newsmax.com/us/virtual_border_fence/2007/10/30/45069.html Accessed 11/20/07.;

Riley, Michael. “Fortress America--Building a Border: Part 2.” Denver Post. 03/06/07http://www.denverpost.com/fortressamerica/ci_5356695. Accessed 11/20/07.;

McLemore, David. “Border Residents fuming over fence plans.” June 26, 2007. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/062707dntex...Accessed 11/20/07;

Downing, Margaret. “Killing Fences: Totally Misconstrued.” Houston Press, May 31 2007. http://www.houstonpress.com/2007-05-31/news/killing-fences-totally-misconstrued/ Accessed 11/20/07;

Richey, Joseph. “Border for Sale: Privitizing Immigration Control. July 5, 2006. http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13845&printsafe=1 Accessed 11/20/07;

PRNewswire. Garland, TX. “Raytheon Awarded Contract with U.K. Home Office for e-Borders Project.” November 14, 2007,http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/NEW03314112007-1.htm Accessed 11/20/07.