Tohono Affirmative DDI 2015 SWS

Tohono Affirmative – DDI 2015 SWS

Contents

Notes

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Contention 1 is the Advantage

First impact is cultural degradation

Second impact is violence

Contention 2 is Solvency

Cards Taken Out recently

Cards to add for more time

Case

Framing

Impact Cards

Culture

Notes

THOMAS BROOKS () and CHARLES HORN ()

SWS

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The United States federal government should cease its border surveillance activities on the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Contention 1 is the Advantage

The Tohono O’odham Nation is a Native American nation that has existed in what is now eastern Arizona and northern Mexico for thousands of years. Following the Mexican-American War, the US-Mexican border was redrawn though Tohono land without consulting the people.

Kilpatrick, 14 (Kate.Reporter/Editor at Al Jazeera America."U.S.-Mexico Border Wreaks Havoc on Lives of an Indigenous Desert Tribe." Aljazeera America.N.p., 25 May 2014. Web. 15 July 2015.)TB

For thousands of years, the Tohono O’odham (meaning “Desert People”) inhabited what is today southern Arizona and the northern state of Sonora in Mexico. But the O’odham were there long before either Mexico or the U.S. existed as nations. “We’ve always been here,” said Amy Juan, 28, a young activist on the reservation. “Nobody can argue that we weren’t here first.” After the Mexican-American War, the international boundary between the U.S. and Mexico was drawn at the Gila River, just north of the O’odham ancestral lands. But the Gadsden Purchase in 1854 redrew the border right through O’odham territory.The O’odham were never consulted. “They just drew a line, and when they drew that line O’odham in Arizona became citizens or were considered part of the U.S., O’odham in Mexico of course were not,” said Carlos G. Veléz-Ibáñez, director of the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. “Unlike some of our Canadian borders, you don’t have the opportunity of dual citizenship or being able to determine which country you’re a citizen of.” In the aftermath of 9/11, O’odham living on the U.S. reservation were forced to deal withthe unintended consequences of a militarized border: Border Patrol agents harass and treat them as undocumented migrants on their sovereign land. Their desert landscape and wildlife get clobbered by migrants, traffickers and federal law enforcement. They return home to find cars stolen, houses ransacked by desperate migrants — migrants who far too often don’t survive the desert elements. It’s also not uncommon for tribal members to be lured by fast cash into working as coyotes or mules for the Mexican cartels, ending up in jail themselves.

For a century and a half, the USFG honored the Tohono’s sovereignty over their land. However, after 9/11, the US stationed Border Patrol agents all over the indigenous nation. Since then, the Tohono nation has become the frontline in America’s battle for border surveillance.

Todd Miller, 11-1-2012, (Todd Miller has researched and written about U.S.-Mexican border issues for more than 10 years. He has worked on both sides of the border for BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona, and Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. He now writes on border and immigration issues for NACL, "Ground Zero: The Tohono O'odham Nation,"

According to Margo Cowan, former general council to the Tohono O’odham Nation, there was no Border Patrol presence on the Nation until 1993. Now, the Department of Homeland Security green-striped SUVs, trucks, cars, and vans are everywhere, at every turn. There are also ATVs, horse patrols, and Predator drones and Blackhawks andother “air assets” flying overhead. There are surveillance towers and scope trucks and a|||n||| Forward Operating Base, which—as with U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—are small, make-shift bases to facilitate “tactical operations” in remote regions. A Joint Task Force Substation that they have on the reservation is supposedly a collaboration between Customs and Border Protection (CBP—Border Patrol's parent agency) and the Tohono O’odham Nation Police Department, but looks more like a mini-Border Patrol station packed with a fleet of CBP vehicles and mobile surveillance trucks. Behind the substation is a chain-linked caged-in area where people are held before agents hand them off to the non-labeled, white Wackenhut bus, as everyone calls them (though Wackenhut has now changed its name to G4S), which will transport the captured migrants to Tucson for further processing and maybe prison time. Mike Wilson, a Tohono O’odham man who puts out water in stations on the reservation indefianceof the Nation’s legislative council, says that the Border Patrol on the Nation has become an“occupying army.”iAn Amnesty International report entitledIn Hostile Terrain, not only underscores the constant violations to undocumented people traveling through this area, particularly death, but also how the border surveillance apparatus has impacted the O’odham people whose aboriginal land extends well into Mexico and has been bisected by an international boundary they never wanted. Amnesty International documents a constant pattern of harrassmentagainst the O’odham, including a pattern of physical and verbal abuse, who now have more federal officers on their “sovereign” nation than any other time in their long, painful history of colonization and forced-assimilation. The presence of Border Patrol on the Nation is buzzing, entrenched, and now apparently expanding. Now besides the flow of agents from Casa Grande and Tucson stations, the Border Patrol has undertaken a massive expansion of the Ajo station, a 52,900 square-foot state-of-the-artfacility. This greatly contrasts with the many aging buildings in the economically-depressed area which previously relied on now barely-functioning mines, another economic model that marginalized and exploited the Tohono O’odham, who were the lowest rung of a racially-segregated wage hierarchy (whites were at the top). You can almost see the tailings of the former copper mine in Ajo (closed in 1985) from the Border Patrol station in Why, an uneasy symbol of one economy replacing another.

As a result, Customs and Border Protection is currently restricting free movement across the Reservation, deporting those who are practicing their culture.

Austin 91(Megan, Fall 1991, A CULTURE DIVIDED BY THE UNITED STATES-MEXICO BORDER: THE TOHONO O'ODHAM CLAIM FOR BORDER CROSSING RIGHTS, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law [Vol. 8, No. 2], Accessed 7/14/15) CH

Although much of the O'odham traditional lands have been taken away, the Tohono O'odham people still have firm spiritual and familial roots in these lands. The border constructs an artificial barrier to the freedom of the Tohono O'odham people to traverse their lands, impairing their ability to collect foods and materials needed to sustain their culture and to visit family members and traditional sacred sites. Specifically, immigration laws prevent many O'odham people from entering the United States from Mexico. Pursuant to these laws, United States immigrations officers can exclude immigrants and non-immigrants for not possessing certain types of documentation such as passports and border identification cards. Immigrations officers can deport "aliens" who do not carry those forms of identification. 18 Using these laws, the United States can detain and deport the Tohono O'odham people who are simply travelling through their own lands, practicing migratory traditions essential to their religion, economy and culture. Customs regulations have a similar effect. United States Customs officials may prevent the Tohono O'odham peoplefrom bringing from one part of their land to another raw materials and goods essential for their spirituality, economy and traditional culture. 2

The exaggerated threat across the border in the name of national security is simply thinly veiled racism.

Rivas, 6(Ofelia, Tohono born and activist fighting for cultural freedom, Immigration, Imperialism and Cultural Genocide: An interview with O’odham Activist Ofelia Rivas concerning the effects of a proposed wall on the US / Mexico border, The Solidarity Project, interviewed by Jeff Hendrix, Accessed 7/15/15) CH

The “illegal immigration” problembecame a problem on O’odham lands when theUnited States government redirected the flow of “illegal trafficking” from Texas and California and funneled the flow through O’odham lands, federal lands on the Untied States side and isolated O’odham communities and farms and ranches on the Mexican side. In the name of “national security” the American system clamps down on “illegal immigration.” “Illegal immigration” from Mexico has now become an immense threataccrding to the government. The so-called “terrorist act” on America is propaganda;America was founded on terrorist acts upon Indigenous peoples of these lands. The truth of the matter is that most Americans live in denial of the criminal acts of genocide and massacre and forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples of these lands. The truth is the threat against national security is used as the basis for the increased “monitoring” of the borders and “enforcement” of immigration lawsand criminalization of humanitarian acts by the O’odham and other peoples. The real “problem” is racism and discrimination; the majority of the people coming from Mexico are brown skinned and poor.

The Border Patrols ever present presence makes the Nation a militarized land, filled with spotlights and weapons. This ILLEGAL occupation of the Tohono reservation means that the Tohono are always already considered illegal and stopped to ask for papers. This destroys heir right to move freely on their lands and destroys their cultural determination

Singleton 9(Sara, January 2009, PHD in political science, and associate professor at Western Washington U, Not our borders: Indigenous people and the struggle to maintain shared lives and cultures in post-9/11 North America, Border Policy Research Institute, Accessed 7/13/15) CH

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established the boundary line between the U.S. and Mexico at the Gila River, which meant that the territories of the people known as the Tohono O’odham became part of Mexico. Five years later, the Gadsden Purchase established the southern boundary of the United States at its present location, and in so doing, bisected the territory of the Tohono O’odham. Today, the reservation is comprised of 2.8 million acres (about the size of Connecticut), abutting 75 miles of the Mexican border, and reaches across the border into northern Sonora, Mexico. The Tohono O’odham Nation has about 27,000 members, more than a thousand of whom live across the border in Mexico. About half of the 3 Between Texas and California, there are eight tribes with communities on both sides of the border: Kumeyaay, Cocopah, Tohono O’odham, Yaqui, Gila River Pima, Yavapai, Ysleta del Sur (Tira) and Kickapoo. Not our borders: Indigenous people and the struggle to maintain shared lives and cultures in post- 9/11 North America remaining tribal members live on the reservation. For the Tohono O’odham, the Yaqui and other native people of the region, the freedom to travel the many paths criss-crossingthe border has always been essential—to gather medicinal plants, to collect a type of clay used at childbirth, or to practice the annual round of ceremonies that sustain the traditional religion and culture. While at the time of treaties the Tohono O’odham were not granted dual citizenship nor given explicit permission to move freely across the border, cross-border travel for work, for socializing and for participation in religious ceremonies was an established and accepted practice for more than a century. In the mid-1980s that began to change, and by the mid-1990s, it began to change dramatically. Today,parts of the formerly quiet, isolated reservation have been transformed into an area bristling with weapons, new roads, spotlights and military surveillance vehicles. Beginning in the 1990s, a series of strategic decisions were made by federal agencies to clamp down on illegal entry at popular border crossing points— beginning in San Diego, California, with “Operation Gatekeeper” (1994), later spreading eastward with “Operation Safeguard” (1995) in central Arizona, and then “Operation Rio Grande” in the southernmost tip of Texas in 1998. Various reasons have been suggested for these successive waves of intense border security—to displace drug and human-trafficking from densely populated areas to less visible locations and to change behavior of would be crossers by re-channeling activity to areas with highly inhospitable conditions. The resulting “funnel effect” relocated vast amounts of illegal border-crossing activity to the Tohono O’odham nation where summer temperatures have been known to reach 130 degrees, water is scarce and the terrain difficult. The costs to the Tohono O’odham have been significant.

This is a blatant attack on the Tohono’s culture.

Luna-Firebaugh 5 (Eileen, January 2005, Volume 19 Access to Justice: The Social Responsibility of Lawyers | Contemporary and Comparative Perspectives on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, ‘AttHascu ‘Am O ‘I-oi? What Direction Should We Take?: The Desert People's Approach to the Militarization of the Border, Accessed 7/14/15) CH

The Tohono O’odham Nation has pursued a legislative approach for a number of years. On May 21, 1987, Representative Morris Udall (D-AZ) introduced House Bill 2506.56 This bill would have “provide[d] for establishment of a roll of the Tohono O’odham Indian people and clarif[ied] certain of their rights.”57 The bill empowered those on the new roll of the Tohono O’odham to pass freely across the U.S.-Mexico border and to live and work in the United States. The Reagan administration had serious misgivings about this bill. They wanted border-crossing privileges extended only to tribal members who were citizens of the United States, and a restriction of what services would be provided to Mexican O’odham while in the United States. The tribe agreed to compromise on these two clauses. A third clause became the sticking point. The federal government wanted the O’odham to cross only at official border crossings.58 While this may seem to be a minor point, for the O’odham it was an attack on who they are as a people and as a sovereign nation. The O’odham have been in the area since time immemorial. They have ancient migratory patterns and settlement sites that are important culturally and traditionally. Further, given the size of the Tohono O’odham reservation (roughly the size of Connecticut) this would require many Tohono O’odham to travel great distances to cross the border. The tribe is unwilling to give up these traditional crossing places on tribal land. When this dispute could not be resolved, the tribe requested that the sponsor of the bill pull it from consideration.59 This assertion of tribal sovereignty and commitment to tradition was to become a signpost of the struggle.