November 13, 2007

US Apartheid Wall under construction on Tohono O'odham lands

By Brenda Norrell
http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com/

SAN MIGUEL GATE, TOHONO O'ODHAM NATION (Arizona) -- The United States' Apartheid Wall is under construction on Tohono O'odham Nation lands, shown here at the San Miguel Gate. Minutes after this photo was taken, a delegation of Mohawks and other Native people stood before the Border Patrol with fists held high in solidarity and would have intervened in the arrest of Mayans, if the Border Patrol had not packed the Mayans into a vehicle and sped away. Delegates from the Indigenous Peoples' Border Summit of the Americas were disgusted to see the border wall going up on Indian land; the "cage" where men women and children are held on Indian land; and the arrests of Mayans, mostly women and children, on Tohono O'odham land. The construction of the border wall on O'odham land has already resulted in the digging up the ancestors of the O'odham from their final resting place, on the western side of Tohono O'odham Nation lands by the contractor Boeing. The border wall will also be a barrier for the traditional ceremonial route of O'odham. Although it is endorsed by the Tohono O'odham Nation government, individual O'odham are protesting the wall with support from Indigenous Peoples throughout the Americas. (Photo Jay Johnson-Castro)

On Big Warm Creek, Living as a Free People

By Brenda Norrell
Special to Navajo Times
Part II of III

BIG WARM CREEK, Montana – Vernie White Cow Main of the White Clay People, remembers the log house where she grew up, the June berries she once picked and the wild horses in the mountains. She also remembers her son Jim Main, Jr., incarcerated in a bordertown for a crime he said he did not commit.
Seated at the table in her kitchen, eating fresh salmon brought to
her by friends, the Sohappy family of the Columbia River Indian Nation, Vernie remembers life along Big Warm Creek on Fort Belknap Nation lands.
Seated at her kitchen table, near the huge wood stove for heat and surrounded by family photos and deer antlers, she looks out back at the log cabin where she grew up.
"I was born in there. My whole family was born in there. We had 14 children," Vernie Main says of her childhood, remembering two sets of twins.
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