Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers have long worked alongside Indigenous peoples to document, analyze, and uncover historical and on-going injustices, violence, and the gross abuses of power which deeply harm Indigenous peoples. NGOs integrate and rely upon community-based Indigenous research for developing critical analysis and crucial knowledge which must be disseminated broadly and effectively in order, as Amnesty International states, to “expose violations of the rights of specific Indigenous individuals at the hands of police and the justice system.” Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s seminal, ground-breaking book, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, originally published in 1999, established an in-depth critique of western paradigms of research and knowledge from the subject position of a “colonised” Maori feminist academic. “Decolonization,” Tuhiwai Smith argued, demands “a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values that inform research practices”. A major contribution, in the second aspect of the book, Tuhiwai Smith sets an agenda for Indigenous researchers conducting research with and alongside our own communities, peoples, and nations. She asserts the critical importance of an Indigenous research agenda, and the crucial demand for Indigenous researchers to claim and create spaces in academe and beyond to develop Indigenous thought, consciousness, and research programs. In this vein, my work, situated in the Nde’ Konitsaaiigokiyaa rivering kinship societies, I reclaim and reposition Nde’ women’s knowledge and analytics in the transition from ‘Lipan Apache’ as the marginally researched, to the Nde’ (Lepaiye) as the researcher, developing the questions, mode of inquiry, and research agenda.
This silk screen print by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde illustrates and affirms my subject position as an Nde’ action and community based researcher. I am committed to research that foregrounds the principles and protocols of Nde’ justice and the ethics involved in working for, with, and alongside Nde’ indigenous rights defenders on the lands that are negatively impacted by the U.S. wall and the militarization of the entire Texas-Mexico international border.
In 2011, the Cuelc’en (Cuelcahen ‘Tall Grass’) Clan Society conferred upon me the high status of a Knowledge Keeper, and Leader of my maternal and paternal Clans’ gowa gokal isdzane–Nde’ governance structure. The Nde’ chiefly Societies and visiting Indigenous land defenders from the O’odham traditional territory recognized my work as beneficial to the Nde’ and, more broadly, to Indigenous peoples whose Indigenous and human rights were being violated en masse by the State (U.S.) and extractive industrial corporate interests in the current period.
The beaded medallion around my neck represents the recognition from the Nde’, with Cuelc’en Society ancestral and cosmological symbols which tie my ancestors’ and my ancestral Societies to the Cuelc’en Societies.
The lightning striking in the vicinty of the wall represents the territory of the Konitsaaii (Big Water) and the Goshich (Lightning) Nde’ Societies in which the wall is situated. Indigenous traditional and territorial homelands are recognized as inherent in international legal systems. However, in Texas and the United States, the governments have willfully denied the legal implications and legacies of a history of violent occupation, land expropriation, and non-recognition. The Nde’ astutely and patiently have revealed the intimately intertwined relationship between colonization and its consequences–displacement, poverty, and extreme marginalization of the Nde– as direct implications that show that colonization knows no time borders. Time is a continuum and a flow for colonization; Indigenous peoples’ stories attest to the intergenerational continuum, and how each generation encounters the settler society whose power is not constrained by historical ‘event’s, rather the settler’s power is unleashed continually across generations to assert ‘rights’, ‘freedoms’ and entitlement to ‘property’ and ‘economic progress’ at the social, economic and political expense of Indigenous peoples.
Red and Blue Corn–sacred and revered–represent the crucial inter-relations between Nde’ peoples and the Uto-Aztekan Nahua, Otomi, Pure’pecha, Coahuiltecan, and Comanche Peoples in the Nde’ customary territory. Corn, like water, like deer, like pecans, like plant medicines, like air, like star-matter, is Life. Blue and Red are sacred colors to the Nde’ with spiritual power in healing ceremonies and in self-governance and self determination.
This image represents an Nde’ perspective on the continuance of the law systems of the territorial Societies, which are still being violated by the nation-state and its citizens. The wall, and the border itself, operate to normalize the alleged ‘legitimacy’ of the settler state and settler nation constitutions, sovereignty, and unilateral decision-maker over Indigenous lands and peoples.
The symbolism in the print confront the colonial, settler, and racist world views based in domination and conquest, and pose a contesting paradigm which unsettles and destabilizes the myth of manifest destiny and european epistemological superiority. The meanings of the symbols, when taken as a whole, work to highlight the transitory nature of the structures and suppositions of the settler nation where Indigenous peoples are concerned. The image works to confront, in a non violent, yet firm way, the foolishness of negating the underlying Indigenous laws of the land which are inalienable, non negotiable, and perpetual.
The Nde’ Societies, which descend from the lands’ Original Peoples, are inseparable from the land. The law is in the Indigenous narratives and Indigenous memory of the land.
The wall is violent, fractious, gutting, dismembering, and wickedly silent. Indigenous peoples’ connect this wall to many forms of the carceral which pre-dated the wall, and the many systems of discipline and punitive violence which are at the root of settler colonialism in Texas, the U.S. and northeastern Mexico. Why are all three sites relevant? Because all are the traditional territory of Nde’ peoples, who never relinquished or surrendered inherent title to the homeland. Supposedly, the settler nations believed that Indigenous peoples would eventually submit, but the opposite has occurred, especially in the last four decades in this region. The decaying, rotting, and corrosive ideas and values of the modern nation-state have little effect on Indigenous resistance movements, and thus, massive use of steel, weaponry, and ‘boots on the ground’ are utilized to effect social engineering to the desires of those who control capital and markets.
The wall is made of steel, concrete, and is 18 feet tall, stretching 70 miles in the middle of Nde’ Konitsaaii gokiyaa–the unceded and unsurrendered homelands of the Nde.
The wall is man-made, (specifically White Man made, as over 93% of the U.S. Congress who voted for and implemented this colossal violation of human rights identified as White, Christian, Male, professional, and lived in zip code area far far away from the affected region). The wall, in my view, (having worked and lived beneath its ominous shadows, off and on, the last 7 years) is fabricated and can be dismantled. The wall is a composite of the Doctrine of Discovery, the Marshall trilogy, settler myopic loathing of ‘el Indio’, and necropolitics … the wall is more ideas, symbols, ideology, dogma, domination, force, and extreme hate and apathy, than anything else In other words, from the Indigenous peoples’ stand point, the wall is an expression of 517 years of ego, superiority complex, hysteria, OCD-ness about white space, greed, sin, death, and fear. Fear is a crucial ingredient. Scale interlocks fear, and scale enforces subjugation to the thought and mind of White domination over Indigenous Others in this crucial era of the post 9/11 expression of the settler within being surrounded by Indigenous peoples on the move across Nigosdzan Earth Woman, Turtle Island.
What can be built can be deconstructed and removed. Water and wind already are doing their part.
Indigenous memory is in the land, and Indigenous peoples re-traumatized by the many levels and acts of force, disrespect, domination, arrogance and hate used to enforce this steel architecture-as-performative-tool-of-domination-in-post9/11–is all festering and seething in the shadow of the wall.
My research is centered in the Indigenous narrative memory which predated the wall, and which is resurging in the shadow of the wall.
My research, the last 7 years, has focused on understanding meaning, context, historical experiences, and implications of Indigenous peoples’ memory which pre-dated the wall, and which is struggling to re-emerge from out of the shadows…
Most of what I’ve learned has been violent and unspeakable. Much of what I’ve grappled with is how Indigenous peoples have survived and persisted, and how Indigenous peoples have managed to move forward in light of extreme violence and destructive acts.
My current project is a book, a film, a community-driven oral testimony collection, and many, many interventions at the U.N, the Inter-American, and of course, in Konitsaaii gokiyaa–an emerging Indigenous transitional justice space to enact Nde’ self-determination beyond walls, borders, and nation-states.