By Lindsey Schmidt, Emerson Solms, Morgan Carmen, Kieran Murphy

PHOENIX— “I feel that because I’m Native American, I don’t see boundaries such as the wall,” says Mariah Sharpe, an 18-year-old member of the Tohono O’odham tribe in Southern Arizona. Sharpe’s Native American community straddles the Mexican-American border and does not even possess a word for wall.

The international boundary cuts through 75 miles of the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation and separates the 2,000 members who live in the Mexican state of Sonora from the 34,000 in Arizona.

“Tohono O’odham Nation Map” by Forest Purnell, Institute of Infinitely Small Things, https://openborders.info/blog/tag/tohono-oodham/

         Mexico’s Territorial Evolution, Wikipedia Commons

 

While most of the Tohono O’odham people live north of the border, most of the tribe’s land is to the south. The borderline, first drawn in 1848 by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and finalized six years later by the Gadsden Purchase, places the majority of the tribe’s land in Mexico. For over 150 years, the border has seen members travelling safely back and forth with only a tribal ID. Recently, the U.S. government, citing concerns about human trafficking and drug smuggling, has been increasing border militarization, sending 5,200 troops to the border the week before Election Day. Only one authorized border crossing remains on the reservation. The Tohono O’odham have partnered with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and invest more than $3 million a year to curb trafficking.

Photograph by Lindsey Schmidt

Tribe members believe President Trump’s wall will jeopardize the very existence of their nation. Rhetoric in support of the wall, notes Sharpe, has started to “generalize the immigrants as serial killers and people who are bad and mean harm to us when really they are trying to … come here for better opportunities to support their families.” She hopes to eradicate the notion that, “because we’re from America … we’re better than those who are in Mexico.” In the end, stresses Sharpe, “We’re all human beings.” She worries that a border wall “is only hurting the cultural … values of our people.”

Mission San Xavier del Bac, Tohono O’odham San Xavier Indian Reservation; Wikipedia Commons

Sharpe’s opposition to the wall is echoed by prominent members of the Nation. The vice chairman, Verlon Jose, has proclaimed, “Over my dead body will we build a wall.” The Tohono O’odham Nation existed before the Mexican-U.S. border, and the members are determined to exist even with the barrier. According to the tribal chairman, Edward Manuel, “The wall would interfere with our way of life, our ceremonies, with our traditional and our cultural activities that we do on both sides of the border, because we still have communities on the Mexican side.” For the Tohono O’odham, a longtime rallying cry of activists for immigrants’ rights literally rings true: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”