The Mexican Tribe That Fears It Will Be Split in Two By Trump's Border Wall Agence France-Presse
go to original April 2, 2017

The indigenous Tohono O’odham tribe with its double identity, both US and Mexican, risks being split in two if US President Donald Trump builds his wall on the border between the two countries. (Agence France-Presse)

On the baked sands of northern Mexico, barefoot tribeswomen chant and dance in clouds of incense, calling on the eagle to save them from US President Donald Trump’s border wall.

The US-Mexico frontier runs through more than just the deserts of Sonora and Arizona. For the Tohono O’odham with their eagle totem, it divides their people.

These are their ancestral lands, a nation that was here thousands of years before the modern states of America and Mexico were drawn on the map in the 19th century.

“This is our land,” says 80-year-old tribal elder Alicia Chuhuhua at the ceremony among the looming cactus plants, speaking in the tongue of her tribe through a Spanish-language interpreter.

“We want it without ‘muros’,” walls, she says, using the Spanish word – in her indigenous tongue, there is no term for “wall” or “border.”

The 3,000 strong Tohono O’odham population – the name means ‘desert people’ – is recognized as an indigenous nation in the United States.

Most of them live on the US side of the border in the town of Sells, Arizona, with a few hundred estimated to live in Mexico.

Read the rest at The Journal

Related: How Scared Should People on the Border Be? (The New York Times)

Related: Tohono O'Odham Nation Makes Video in Opposition to Border Wall (ABC News)

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