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
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.
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Vicam Pueblo Water Rights Forum 2012 Photo Brenda Norrell |