Yaqui Assassinated Water Rights Defender Tomas Rojo: Tomas' Words Translated Now, Nine Years Later

Yaqui Assassinated Water Rights Defender Tomas Rojo: Tomas' Words Translated Now, Nine Years Later

Text in EnglishDisappeared Yaqui Water Rights Defender Tomas Rojo: Video 2012

Special thanks to Anayansa Garza for this translation and honoring our friend Tomas Rojo. After Tomas went missing from Vicam Pueblo on May 27, I found this video interview that I did with him at the Vicam Rights Forum in Sonora in 2012. Thanks to Anayansa, it is now translated, 9 years later. Tomas was murdered in a horrible way, with a blow to his skull, and a hammer found near his shallow grave near Vicam. But, as our friend Ofelia Rivas, Tohono O'odham, said, "They could not kill his spirit." Here are Tomas' words as he sat centered, at peace, speaking of the water and his people. -- Brenda

Article and video copyright Brenda Norrell, Censored News

Transcribed and translated by Anayanse Garza

https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2012/11/video-yaqui-foro-internacional-del-agua.html

My name is Tomás Rojo Valencia. I am a member of the traditional authority of the Yoeme peoples. We have a lifetime of struggle, but specifically in the water issue, we have been fighting for three years.

Previously, we have actively participated in the problems that affect our people. As we said a moment ago, in the last 500 years of the Yaqui tribe, like the majority of indigenous peoples, the main element that has always weighed on the conscience of our people and each one of its men, women, children and elders is the struggle for the land and the water.

We will not rest until we connect our objectives and achieve this task that rests in the memory of our elders. The only thing that we do is to give continuity, under conditions not as severe, for what they fought for.

They fought in the mountains among the stones, among the thorns, among the bush, among the wild animals that were their friends.

And today we continue to fight under other conditions, first using the knowledge of our ancestors and what we have learned in the schools and with the instruments that the development of our own societies gives us, which are the laws, the right and the normative practices of our peoples and the international laws.

And with the pencil and paper, to give continuity to this struggle, to be able to recover what has been ours, what has been recognized and what has been taken from us.  That which is the land and the water.

And for this it is also very important to fight in parallel for better material living conditions for the Yaqui families.

That the living conditions they have be so that they can live as dignified people.

That they be given the opportunity that they deserve, the generations that are currently at play right now, the children that are at play, under the children at play that later will be the struggle for our people at play.

For them, what we do, what we can minimally do, is to want to vindicate ourselves with our right, being congruent with our history and the glorious past of our ancestors.

Vicam Pueblo Water Rights Forum 2012 Photo Brenda Norrell

Article translated and video transcribed by Anayanse Garza in Espanol below.

By Brenda Norrell

Translation by Anayanse Garza

Censored News

June 19, 2021

Mohawk Nation News 'Criminally Insane McGill University'

CRIMINALLY INSANE MCGILL UNIVERSITY

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Mohawk Nation News

July 26, 2021

Listen to audio at MNN:
https://mohawknationnews.com/blog/2021/07/26/criminally-insane-mcgill-university-audio/

MNN. July 26, 2021. There are allegations from a survivor, Ann Diamond, of unmarked graves behind the Allan Memorial Hospital of McGill University, on the south slope of Mount Royal. “These unmarked graves are a big secret. There has been no physical proof that kids are buried there, but some would have been native kids in Dr. Ewen Cameron’s experiments between 1953 and 1964. Between 17 and 25 children are buried there”. The higher learning schools with the intellectual geniuses were brought in to help design the premeditated genocide horror. One aspect was to ensure that protesters are silenced.