Puncture an O Odham no Borders Call

Puncture: An O’odham No Borders Call A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Politics. 2021 ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Holes 4 Pen to Paper 7 Entwined 10 United Snakkkes: Refusal 15 Torpedo: Revolution 27 Prick: Repair 36 Conclusion 43 Bibliography 45 iii Acknowledgements Thank you to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, for caring for this corner of the planet. iv “When should we play the political game, in the pre-defined political context, and when should we breach those definitions and insist on other forms of relationality? Can we do both at the same time? This paradox has two sides. On the one hand, there is the necessity to survive in a modern capitalist context that is inherently violent and completely unsustainable, a system that makes life outside of it almost impossible . . . We have to fight for our lands, our rights, our languages and our cultures using the language of the nation state, if we want to be successful. On the other hand, and at the same time, if we know that system is unsustainable, we have a responsibility to give our children an alternative mode of existence that might not be defined by that system. It is a reconciliation that starts in our guts and stretches out to recognize our inseparability.” -Cindy Blackstock “In the desert, storms can bring life.” -Amrah Salomón v Introduction In June 2011, O’odham people and allies took over the Tucson Border Patrol Headquarters. In the music video for Phoenix hip hop group Shining Soul’s 2011 track “PAPERS,” there is footage of resistors planting a “STOP MILITARIZATION ON INDIGENOUS LANDS NOW” banner inside the building.1 Shining Soul’s Emcee Liaison raps, “Officer tripping like our land be his / Pop quiz: how did we let it get this far? / Spy drones got me on radar /. . . . all up in my backyard.”2 A news release concerning the action from the youth coalition O’odham Solidarity Across Border Collective reads, “Their action . . . was carried out under the banner of Direct Action for Freedom of Movement.”3 This is echoed on the collective’s list of demands to Border Patrol: “Support and ensure freedom of movement for all people.” 1 “PAPERS by Shining Soul,” July 24, 2011, video, 3:13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x79mpAj84ww. 2 Ibid. 3 Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity,” O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective, February 21, 2011 to November 20, 2014, http://oodhamsolidarity.blogspot.com/search/label/Indigenous%2FMigrant%20Solidarity. The US-Mexico border cuts through the heart of O’odham people’s homelands. The boundary was drawn without consent of the tribe;4 the line splits the desert and catches them on both sides of settler nations. O’odham lands are the deadliest migrant passage in the US. Moving through this hot desert-scape, there’s little water. In 2017, the Tohono O’odham Nation and tribal police issued a brief recommending surveillance technology instead of the proposed building of a steel wall.5 During the Trump administration, forty-five million gallons of water were extracted from O’odham lands. Bulldozers unearthed ancestral O’odham remains. In 2020, O’odham water protectors praying and standing their ground in the border construction zone were met with rubber bullets, tear gas, arrest, and death threats. While there are shared complaints about militarization of the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, there is disagreement about whether to provide water and shelter to migrants. My work seeks out O’odham audibly standing for the lives of those migrating, and against not just the steel wall, but against the border itself — oftentimes blazing in opposition. I ask, how does insurgent antiborder organizing by O’odham people transform ways of thinking about migration and borders? I dug through footage of resistance to border construction and published blog entries of the O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. I also drew upon the imagery and lyrics of Shining Soul, a group that includes O’odham and Chicano members, as a key way into O’odham anti-border thinking. Their songs track anti-border actions and stances. Another source I drew upon is Harsha Walia, scholar and co-founder 4 “At U.S.-Mexico Border, a Tribal Nation Fights Wall That Would Divide Them," PBS NewsHour Weekend, video, 11:02, January 13, 2019,” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/at-us-mexico-border-a-tribal-nation-fights-wall-thatwould-divide-them. 5 “Issue Brief: The Tohono O'odham Nation Opposes a "Border Wall," February 2017, http://Www.TonationNsn.Gov/Wp-Content/Uploads/2017/02/Issue-Brief-Tohono-Oodham-Nation-Opposes-Border-Wall.Pdf.” 2 of the migrant justice campaign No One Is Illegal. She argues that “crises of displacement and immobility”6 be named as not only the cause of present-day migration, but as the material roots of bordering. Walia asks the question, “What does it mean to undo border thinking?”7 She writes, “A no borders politics is not abstract; it is grounded in the material and lived impacts of our world, scarred by warfare and warming . . . A no borders politics . . . is a politics of refusal, a politics of revolution, and a politics of repair.”8 An O’odham no borders politics refuses not only the US border line, but refuses the colonial bounds of nationhood to begin with. It connects the historical roots of Indigenous dispossession into the present moment, naming the material occupation of O’odham lands by the US as militarization. The O’odham stance claims the US is trespassing on their lands. At the same time, O’odham resisters combat asymmetrical control of movement, keeping an eye on dislocation caused by white supremacy. An O’odham no borders politics is a politics of revolution; it asks how to go forward. O’odham fighters do not silo their no borders call, but instead map coresistance—a solidarity from which policing and border logic can be confronted. It is about interconnected violence, but always from a particular, place-based standpoint. Finally, an O’odham no borders politics is a politics of repair, but it has bite. It is against reforms that divide peoples—the O’odham standpoint asks questions instead of posing one solution. It unties the border, to give way to other ways of living that have existed all along. 6 Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2021), 3. 7 “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and Racist Nationalism,” Haymarket Books, video, 1:25:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRZNfkgSrXo. 8 Walia, Border and Rule, 213–14. 3 Holes There is little academic work solely dedicated to the intersection of Indigenous and migration politics, and none focused only on the O’odham struggle. Linguistic anthropologist Christina Leza’s (Yoeme-Chicana) 2019 title is about an alliance of tribes, Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras, many from what is now considered the US-Mexico borderlands. Her work discusses the impact, since the 1950s, of border policies on Yaqui, O’odham, and Chicanx families living in communities like Barrio Libre in South Tucson. She touches on the experience of Pai, Kickapoo, and Lipan Apache peoples, tracking legislative moves tribes have made against the US. Leza discusses internal divisions, such as between Mexican and US relatives, between on-reservation and off-reservation peoples, and between conflicting views on the border: “The desire of many Tohono O’odham for community protection through increased border surveillance contends with a strong desire to demilitarize a border that increasingly limits O’odham movement, separates O’odham relatives, and threatens O’odham traditional lifeways.”9 In one moment, Leza gestures at Indigenous peoples’ potential solidarity with those migrating. She leaves it a disagreement tangled in ethnic and colonial divisions amongst Indigenous activists. In one Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras’ 2007 declaration Leza cites, the alliance requests that border policies “contain language that protects southern indigenous border nations.”10 There’s no demand to protect those migrating. 9 Christina Leza, Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2019), 8. 10 Ibid, 20. 4 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg), a Canada First Nations author, takes up the call for solidarity. For her, this is centered in Indigenous peoples using their nation to refuse settler boundaries and connect into other struggles. My work investigates what happens if for O’odham, Simpson’s call is shifted to refusal enacted outside the boundary of the Tohono O’odham Nation. There is work authored on the already-entangled issues of Indigenous peoples and bordering practices that hints at the potential born from intersections of Indigenous and migration politics. In her 2021 title, Walia, migration scholar and organizer, writes that “American liberals . . . rarely locate immigration and border policies within broader systemic forces . . . US immigration enforcement has been routine and bipartisan practice for over two centuries . . . It is essential . . . that we ask how and why the border is made.”11 Since the Biden presidency took office in 2021, there’s been more discussion on NAFTA and the roots of displacement, which in part resolves Walia’s critique. My work furthers the second part of her criticism, her question of the existence of borders themselves. The O’odham case stands against solutions that claim to address root causes without questioning colonial borders at their root. Walia argues that it was concurrent processes that solidified the border, creating the methods recognizable today: “The US-Mexico border must be understood not only as a racist weapon to exclude migrants and refugees, but as foundationally organized through, and hence inseparable from, imperialist expansion, Indigenous elimination, and anti-Black enslavement.”12 My work puts this into conversation with O’odham resisters, asking how this seeps into the present moment and what should be done about it. In her 11 12 Walia, Border and Rule, 21. Ibid, 21. 5 conclusion, Walia calls for solidarity, and hints at its potential strength and promises, but doesn’t map out how this could be generated in the Southern Borderlands. The work of scholar Jenna M. Loyd from 2012 connects the violence of the prison system to the criminalization of migrants on the border and across the US. For her, connecting issues is essential to moving into a border abolitionist stance. I use her tool of interrelation to tie the criminalization of migrants into the militarization of Indigenous peoples. I explore how this is taken up and practiced in O’odham no border assertions, and how this might begin to form a politics of repair. Both Walia and Simpson reveal the settler context — that this is an issue stretching across both US borders, and all over the world. My work instead turns to closely focus on one spot in the Southern borderlands. I keep these authors’ claims and questions in view, but look to how these ideas are taken up, contested, or furthered by O’odham people. My work asks how Indigenous and migration politics are woven and mapped on O’odham ground. 6 Pen to Paper “Smash borders” cuts through a pulsing beat, lines punctuated by a tenor voice that cracks but chants on, unwavering. This is one of Shining Soul’s tracks, the group I stumbled upon last summer. It set in motion this work. I never reconsidered how much borders determine our world until I fell in love with someone from another country. I filed a visa, but it ground to a halt when the pandemic hit. There were moments I imagined gripping a mallet and doing away with the US border after my partner hit his breaking point and ended the relationship. Once the dust of my border-smashing rage settled, I wanted to learn to un-see borders as a given. I had never seen beyond them. There are those that do, though. My primary research material is O’odham activism, which has a number of parts. I transcribed webinars from O’odham Anti-Border Collective, sifted through their Facebook page, and surveyed all the news coverage and video footage I could scrape up of anti-border-wall actions. I used the lyrics, songs, and spliced music video imagery of Phoenix hip hop group Shining Soul, whose members are Emcee Liaizon, Bronze Candidate, and DJ Reflekshin. I transcribed and analyzed three of Shining Soul’s songs and accompanying music videos that speak to the intersection of migrant and Indigenous struggles. The choice to draw upon Shining Soul is bolstered by author Kyle T. Mays’ (Saginaw Chippewa) claim that Indigenous hip hop is a new assertion of Indigenous sovereignty: “Indigenous Hip Hop is not just Native people performing the culture of hip hop; it is an anthem, a voice, a literary and decolonial movement.” He coins it “combat 7 literature.”13 Mays sees Indigenous hip hop artists honing “Commitment to mutual liberation based on the proposition that colonial power must be rendered diffuse across multiple hemispheres through reciprocal struggle,”14 the beats effectively growing “a praxis of space sharing and revolutionary joint struggle against oppression of all kinds.”15 Shining Soul say they “use emceeing as a platform to speak about the struggles that our respective communities face . . . In our efforts, we use Hip Hop as a tool to empower community, especially youth, by informing them of the issues via dope beats, dope rhymes, and by providing context of the struggles we face.” In line with Mays, they see “creativity as a weapon. The element of rap allows us to speak . . . so we can challenge the imperialistic pillars that attack us everyday . . . in hopes to appreciate and respect all the beauty and power that originates from our dignified cultures.”16 One member claims, “we’ve done direct actions and protests, but I feel music for me is like a torpedo, for people who don’t know about this shit.”17 Shining Soul’s music led me to the posts of O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective (OSABC), the muscle of my investigation and potential answers to my question. Emcee Liaizon is the author behind some of O’odham Solidarity Across Border Collective’s posts I coded. He took part in many direct actions. The lyrics of Shining Soul’s song “PAPERS” informed my list of codes. I coded over fifty printed pages of 13 Kyle T. Mays, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 461. 14 Ibid, 474. 15 Ibid, 475. 16 "Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. 17 Carl Gibson, “Shining Soul: A Phoenix Hip-Hop Duo Raps on Border Militarization,” Occupy.com, November 11, 2013, https://www.occupy.com/article/shining-soul-phoenix-hip-hop-duo-raps-bordermilitarization#sthash.D8HRDF41.AAe2hAsu.dpbs. 8 text, first combing through OSABC’s posts to mark themes, then returning to them twice more to track frequency and patterns. When drawing upon this primary material, I asked myself the questions that Leanne Besamoke Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg) asks herself when citing others: “Where does this theory come from? What is the context? How was it generated? Who generated it?”18 As a non-O’odham, non-Indigenous person and US passport holder, I do not attempt to near any equivalence, freezing, or making stagnant of disparate experiences of O’odham individuals or those migrating. As the researcher and writer of this piece, I am a story catcher looking for through lines. It is not my place to draw conclusions on issues internal to O’odham peoples and the Tohono O’odham Nation. I set out to pull together multiple sources that, in alignment, begin to trace a stance against the border, against borders. This story is about the possibilities of an O’odham no borders politics; it is about what this politics might offer to wider debates of the border. The songs and the fight, the images and the words— the material of my work—become the theory that set in motion the breaking open of the border. 18 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 63. 9 Entwined The 1,755 migrant deaths from 1999-2009, each marked with a red dot on Humane Borders/Fronteras Compasivas’ geographical record, form bursts as they overlap.19 During the Obama-Biden administration, more than 3 million people were deported, and 3,362 bodies were recovered in the desert.20 The most concentrated red maps out O’odham homelands. Emcee Liaison, member of O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective and Shining Soul, trails migrants crossing O’odham lands to security measures that form the locked-down spots of Nogales, El Paso, and Tijuana. “With the push of NAFTA in 1994, we had an influx of economic refugees migrate here from the so-called line to the South, and of course, the state cracked down . . . So what happens is they have to go through the hottest, most rural, craziest areas to go, which happen to be where I’m from,” he said in a 2013 19 “199-2009 recorded migrant deaths, USBP rescue beacons, and HB water stations,” Humane Borders, https://humaneborders.org/wp-content/uploads/cumulativemap20002010.pdf. 20 Max Granger, “The Border Patrol Is Leaving Migrants to Die,” High Country News, February 3, 2021, https://www.hcn.org/articles/ideas-immigration-the-border-patrol-is-leaving-migrants-to-die. 10 interview. “In the Tohono O’odham Nation, my people have been stuck literally in the middle of this war that’s been happening.”21 In reaction to migration through O’odham lands increasing, US bordering practices intensified in the Sonoran Desert. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley claims that, “As long as the nation-state is understood to be a corporation and therefore owned, ownership also takes on a domestic quality. Nationalist discourse is about protecting the home front, and the nation is cast as a home in need of security in an unstable world.”22 Yet migration to the US isn’t intrinsically dangerous to either the nation or those migrating. Harsha Walia and many other organizers point to border deterrence methods as the originator of border killings — those red dots piercing O’odham lands. As the border line cuts into sacred O’odham lands, so too does it cut down lives. O’odham people opposing the border deepen this point. As Amrah Salomón, O’odham descendent and O’odham Anti-Border Collective (OABC) member puts it, “Border violence is severing in order to devalue, extract, and control. It is an inherent violation of all things sacred, regenerative, and sustainable.”23 OABC leader Nellie Jo David adds that the fierce heat of the Sonoran Desert is used by Border Patrol to restrain migrants: “This is a corridor where Prevention Through Deterrence is used to target migrants that are coming through, because it is known by authorities that water is such a precious resource. If they don’t have that water, that means the end of the life cycle.”24 21 Gibson, “Shining Soul: A Phoenix Hip-Hop Duo Raps on Border Militarization.” Walia, Border and Rule, xvi. 23 Amrah Salomón, "Decolonizing the Disaster: Defending Land & Life During Covid-19," Political Theology Network, October 24, 2020, https://politicaltheology.com/decolonizing-the-disaster-defending-land-life-during-covid19/. 24 “O’odham Land Defenders Lead Indigenous Resistance to Trump’s Border Wall Amid Militarized Crackdown,” Democracy Now!, video, October 12, 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/2020/10/12/organ_pipe_national_monument_border_wall. 22 11 Margo Tamez (Ndé) remarks, “I am confronted by silences among some people along the wall. Exhuming the loss of their everyday intimate physical spaces, silence spreads like illness; people adapt to the treadmill; outrage is repressed.”25 Walia pivotally articulates the crisis in the world that is reflected on O’odham lands: “In 2018, as many as 164 land defenders were killed protecting their land from invasive industries like mining, logging, and agribusiness. The same year, border controls killed 4,780 people worldwide. Freedom is always in excess of capitalist economies, hierarchical orderings, and bordered sovereignties; the freedom to stay and the freedom to move are thus intertwined, and the most urgent and ethical response to the asymmetries of power generating mass displacement and immobility today.”26 My work picks up this thread, searching out what this means concretely for O’odham people, and what lessons this pocket of border opposition holds. O’odham resisters take on this entwinement, and their work thus begins to scorch the border. ~ In February of 2017, I stayed with my sister Rosa in the staff housing of Organ Pipe National Monument, which lies within O’odham lands. She worked the vegetation crew along the border, and many of her restoration sites were the tracks from Border Patrol trucks streaking the desert crust. In the morning, we picked our way across a gravel road to a section of low fencing designating the line between nations. At the time I didn’t question whose lands we were on. Often, on her route to work she passed groups of over fifty people standing along the road, seeking asylum. 25 26 Ibid, 69. Walia, Border and Rule, 15. 12 She told me it was as if she would pass some test when Border Patrol trucks slowed upon seeing her. They would speed away once they saw the truck with a National Park Service logo parked nearby. The next day, we drove to a small pit stop in Mexico. I showed my US passport twice, and was waved on. Just into Mexico, Rosa and I sipped beer from a tiny pit stop. Standing in the parking lot just off the highway, we watched white and green Border Patrol trucks flash by every two minutes. ~ Jo David sees A’al Wappia (Quitobaquito Spring), which lies next to the border, as “the source of life,” essential to O’odham peoples in extremely arid lands. In February of 2020, over sixty O’odham people gathered for a ceremony aside the spring. “We camped, sang, prayed and danced in the desert,”27 water protector Hon’mana Seukteoma explained. In the morning, twenty-six O’odham women caught spring water. “We passed water from our sacred springs to our relatives in Mexico, right where the 30-foot steel wall is now being built,”28 Seukteoma said. In September 2020, the National Park Service (NPS) closed access to the spring, which lies in Organ Pipe National Monument, due to border construction.29 Onk Akimel Kikam, an elder-led group from Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, spoke against the violation at A’al Wappia. According to the organization, “NPS is just as guilty of fear and intimidation tactics as the Border Patrol,” performing “modern-day cultural genocide,” as there are ancestors buried near the spring and there was “no access to the 27 Hon’mana Seukteoma, “Standing Together: Our Fight for Quitobaquito,” Medium, October 23, 2020, https://medium.com/center-for-biological-diversity/standing-together-our-fight-for-quitobaquito-ac6ea472f20b 28 Ibid. 29 Alisa Reznick, “NPS closes route to Quitobaquito Springs,” September 29, 2020, https://news.azpm.org/p/newssplash/2020/9/29/180978-nps-closes-route-to-quitobaquito-springs/. 13 springs to honor the dead.”30 OABC leader Nellie Jo David called out NPS for their role in stripping O’odham peoples of their home: “These lands which are so-called national monuments are actually unceded territories in which Indigenous people have been pushed off and intentionally erased.”31 Harsha Walia notes that early on, “The U.S. seized more than 525,000 square miles of territory in Mexico, shifting the border south . . . Indigenous lands were seized, and sovereign nations . . . were forcibly assimilated into the US nation-state.”32 As well as the theft of large swaths of land, methods of control included “confinement on reservations,” and “control through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and imposition of tribal council governance.”33 Jennifer Marley (San Ildefonso Pueblo), a leader of The Red Nation group claimed at a 2018 roundtable in Albuquerque on "Sovereignty and Sanctuary" that what “needs to be talked about is that our nation is our only way to exert power against the US settler state. And so, this is why we need to constantly prioritize improving the material conditions of oppressed people all over the world through Indigenous movements.” Then Jo David posed a key question, formed from the comment that “they [the US] really have our tribal government by the strings completely.” She asked, “We are fighting against the wall, which is good, but what are we using to fight against it?”34 My work asks: How is refusal to the border framed? How precisely is the border undone? And finally, how is repair navigated? 30 Ibid. Alisa Reznick, “Border wall scars: ‘It feels like if someone got a knife and dragged it across my heart,” February 4, 2021, https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-borderlands-border-wall-scars-it-feels-like-if-someone-got-a-knife-anddragged-it-across-my-heart. 32 Walia, Border and Rule, 23. 33 Ibid, 24. 34 "Sovereignty and Sanctuary: A Roundtable," Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, no. 1, 2018, 141-154. 31 14 United Snakkkes:35 Refusal The phrase “The migration struggle is also an Indigenous struggle” appears on the screen in Shining Soul’s 2011 track “PAPERS” as a voice says “Go ahead and turn off your vehicle.” This song was written years before a steel wall was built on O’odham lands. “Why is that?” responds Emcee Liaison as two Border Patrol officers circle the car. Emcee Liaison again: “You have no right to do that. It’s our land, not your land.” ~ For Nishnaabeg author Simspon, refusal begins with the question, “What if no one sided with colonialism? What happens, then, when we build movements that refuse colonial recognition as a starting point and turn inwards, building a politics of refusal that is generative?”36 In the view of scholar and organizer Walia, one task at hand is to “Make divisions created by the border obsolete,”37 careful not to fall into a pan-Indigenous 35 “Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. Emcee Liaison uses "United Snakkkes" as a critical euphemism of the US in an OSABC post on the history of US occupation of O'odham lands. 36 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 177. 37 “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and Racist Nationalism,” Haymarket Books . 15 vision. My study grounds the task Walia and Simpson lay out in one specific place, testing out whether and how refusal is formed. In one OABC webinar, member Napoleon Marrietta shared that before colonial bounding divided O’odham peoples into separate nations and created TON, there were connected bands of O’odham.38 He grew up seeing Tohono O'odham Nation as separate from other O’odham peoples. Now he’s against the colonial structures that divide up and categorize O’odham people — he sets forth kinship across territories. “What anti-border means is there’s no such thing as a reservation . . . there are traditional territories, it should matter that we continue to fight alongside each other because of the traditional homelands we share,”39 Marrietta explained. This names colonial bounding as dispossession of O’odham peoples, as it attempted to cut O’odham ties and ways of existing together on the land. Using homelands instead of the Tohono O’odham Nation builds place-based resistance unbounded by the nation state model, the US’s mode of division. These O’odham remembering shared territory resists friction, caused by colonial divisions, that often divides O’odham people. This O’odham position against the multiple ways in which their peoples were bordered by the US gives grounded, material possibility to Simpson’s enunciation that “the epic nature of settler colonialism requires radical responses. Radical resurgence requires a deeply critical reading of settler colonialism and Indigenous response to the current relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. . . . Radical requires us to name dispossession as the meta-dominating force.”40 38 “An Evening With O’odham Anti-Border Collective,” American Indian Community House Inc. September 15, 2020. Video, 1:45:00, https://www.facebook.com/AmericanIndianCommunityHouseInc/videos/an-evening-withoodham-anti-border-collective-solidarity-with-our-oodam-relative/605015140173967/, 17:00. 39 Ibid. 40 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 48. 16 Pulled from an undercurrent to the surface, O’odham claims to land beyond TON bounds, in the words of Ndé writer Margo Tamez, is a “key nexus.”41 O’odham claim to lifeways beyond the scope of the border break through what is thought of as a given— it generates a passageway. This passageway is necessarily based in movement. The history on O’odham lands as O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective understands it is one chock full of and told through movement and the absence of movement. They write, “The O’odham would freely travel throughout their traditional lands and were unaware of the events that were happening south of them in Central Mexico with the arrival of the Spanish.”42 Even once the line delineating the US and 41 Margo Tamez in Jenna M. Loyd, Mitchelson’s Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (Athens: U of Georgia, 2012), 58. 42 “Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. 17 Mexican nations was drawn up, O’odham continued their pilgrimages and ceremonial travels, maintaining family and material ties across the line: “The O’odham in Mexico would still travel to the U.S. side for medical needs in the tribal capital of Sells, to buy goods and to see family. The O’odham in the U.S. crossed southwards to do the same.”43 The requirement of I.D. to cross, increased fencing, and blocking of traditional passageways through the desert “attacked the Tohono O’odham people’s autonomy of free movement and right to culture.”44 The language of “attack” is used repeatedly by OSABC to frame how O’odham movement was halted. OSABC’s claim to freedom of movement throws into doubt the border as securing anything; instead, it reveals the culprit of violence as the US nation preventing natural movement. Walia makes the argument that, “State-centric taxonomies like “unauthorized arrival” and “asylum seeker” are only possible because of a prevailing assumption of the border as a legitimate institution of governance. Even liberals arguing for more human immigration policies presuppose the border is natural without explaining who it serves or how it functions. Nicholas De Genova probes, “If there were no borders, there would be no migration — only mobility.” Most ironic, the migration crisis is declared a new crisis with Western countries positioned as its victims, even though for four centuries nearly eighty million Europeans became settler-colonists across the Americas and Oceania, while four million indentured laborers from Asia were scattered across the globe and the transatlantic slave trade kidnapped and enslaved fifteen million Africans. Colonialism, genocide, slavery, and indentureship are not only conveniently erased as continuities of violence in current invocations of a migration crisis, but are also the very conditions of possibility for the West’s preciously guarded imperial sovereignty.”45 Colonialism bounding O’odham and eventually stopping their practices of movement can be read as one of these “conditions of possibility” for the US claim to 43 Ibid. Ibid. 45 Walia, Border and Rule, 6. 44 18 nationhood and ownership of O’odham land. There are over 15 instances of O’odham claims to land in OSABC posts, more often than not accompanied by assertions of movement. These paired claims do not float in the ether, nor are they pipe dreams — it is life as lived by O’odham centuries before and during and against multiple empires. It’s an insistence to look closely at how the world actually is, outside of the frames of reference narrowed by colonization. OSABC takes Walia’s argument a step further by connecting the question of the mobility of migrants to a strong argument against the border itself. O’odham refuse to recognize colonial boundaries and lay claim to a life of movement across the desert for multiple peoples. “The fortress is the US, taken and secured by force . . . The border is therefore illegitimate and we need not and must not regard migrants as helpless victims to justify their crossing. Everyone should have the right to freedom of movement,”46 reads one OSABC post. Necessarily, the claim is tied to the ground, to the desert. Directed at those wielding settler privilege, OSABC declared in a 2009 post, “We represent the biggest threat to their way of life… Our proud existence sheds the truth to their settler mythology of the Americas.”47 One of Walia’s claims is that practices of US settlement are fastened into the creation of borders themselves: “the war on migrants does not exist separate from or simply parallel to anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence. Early US bordering practices, were, in fact, conceived of as a method of eliminating Indigenous people.”48 If we look to the O’odham case, it is not only early bordering practices that attempted to eliminate their 46 “Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. Ibid. 48 Walia, Border and Rule, 23. 47 19 lifeways. Walia suggests the way in which the Indigenous struggle is tied into the border, but doesn’t track this connection into the present moment for O’odham and others in the Southern borderlands. The O’odham case requires that the historical patterns also be recognized in the present because methods of technological, material US occupation have been implemented in the blink of an eye. Funding for the border has persistently soared: “The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, signed in 2018, was the largest border enforcement and immigration budget in history. Receiving a whopping $23.7 billion for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE, DHS became the country’s largest enforcement agency, with a budget 6,000 percent larger than in 1980.”49 A significant portion of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s budget goes to border enforcement measures. O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective’s written work names the presence of Border Patrol’s enforcement practices on O’odham lands as “militarization.” It’s a pattern fore-fronted across the months and years of their published posts, frequently 49 Ibid, 21. 20 tagged by the physical aspects of militarization butting into O’odham homelands: towers with sensors, rotating cameras, and laser systems. The collective writes, “Surveillance technology, such as radio towers have been constructed on and off the reservation in DHS “Virtual Wall”. Traditional ports of entry and the immediate border area are a complete militarized zone.”50 For OSABC, the militarization doesn’t stop at the technologies roaming their lands. In 2010 they published that, “Communities along this border have experienced the unrelenting infestation of increasingly abusive Border Patrol agents, aerial drones, in-land weaponized checkpoints during daily routines in their own neighborhoods, and increased freight traffic.”51 A 2011 post adds, “1,200 National Guard troops have been stationed along the southwestern border since June 2010.”52 There is a distinct uptick ringing through. For O’odham, while the division is not new, militarization is etching lines from the borderline itself out and across their land. The sense of being watched extends into the rest of the surrounding desert, landing on people on and off the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation. “The concerns of the villages grow in fear of the on-going tactics that is plainly disguised as a ‘part of the rules of conduct for testing sensors and technology,’ have now made the Tohono O’odham people walking targets and criminals in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in our own homelands,” writes OSABC. “As O’odham people, we face the ever-growing crucial attacks on Homes, traditional routes, and Identity as indigenous people.”53 Saliently, OSABC records that technologies stationed on O’odham land quickly became a fixture of militarization: “TON [Tohono 50 “Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 51 21 O’odham Nation] initial “cooperation” with DHS to establish vehicle barriers, checkpoints and integrated camera-radar systems on their lands has led to an escalation in these measures. Border Checkpoints have now become permanent.”54 The O’odham stance tracking militarization as a relatively recent development on O’odham homelands breaks open the idea that it's always been this way. Up against the boundary as bordering technology has been pushed into the rest of their land, this counter from an O’odham stance traces reality — this is not how it’s always been, or how it always will be or must be. The militarization being built up is the latest form of the US attempting to re-confirm its boundaries. And if the US needs to make its boundaries evermore permanent, OSABC questions the very permanency of the US-Mexico border to begin with. Pushing this further, OSABC’s scrutiny of border militarization enunciates the process by which the methods came to be: “O’odham are stuck in policies that have been created not by them, but by the bigger ever-existing colonial systems where borders are established to maintain capital flow. The U.S.’s objectives in its war with Mexico and James Gadsden purchase in the 1800’s [through which the US acquired 29,670 square miles from Mexico] is essentially the same as what the U.S. Border policies are today: to ensure capital at the expense of indigenous displacement.”55 Reading border security this way, named by O’odham as a militarization, locates the larger US nation-state structure re-making itself. Here it is useful to think with Patrick Wolf’s concept in “understanding the indigenous viewpoint: ‘invasion is structure not an event.’”56 OSABC’s posts call 54 Ibid. Ibid. 56 Loyd, Beyond Walls and Cages, 8. 55 22 attention to the physical structures of invasion, but the frequency of the codes “occupation,” “invasion,” and “attack” of O’odham lands and peoples simultaneously extend it beyond the surveillance towers. ~ At a gathering of people living right alongside the border, OSABC sent a group to speak up. There’s a grainy video of their words. Addressing the crowd of white local residents upset at Border Patrol’s presence on what they deem their private property, an O’odham youth raises the mic to his mouth, his voice coming in crisp even in the garbled, pixelated video: “Welcome to our world, welcome to what happened to us,” he says, “welcome to what we go through.”57 The speaker shares that for the past eight years, he has been pulled over every time he enters and leaves the Tohono O’odham reservation. ~ Besides the technology clogging up and turning eyes onto O’odham, the frisking is an aspect that showed up among the collectives’ posts framed over and over again as “racism.” This connects the material of surveillance to a shared control of migrant and Indigenous bodies: “The same cameras that watch the border also watch our streets and populate our freeways, tracking our every move. These systems of control and dislocation overlap and affect all of us and, increasingly, they are everywhere.”58 This surveillance often has to do with the question of citizenship as it is brought to bear on the lives of O’odham people. In “PAPERS,” Shining Soul rap “red light, blue light, keep still / checking for ID, you get the ideal / ‘Who ya family be? Where your papers at?’”59 57 Ibid, 4:35. “Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. 59 “PAPERS by SHINING SOUL.” 58 23 Connecting citizenship to immigration policy, Walia argues that “In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act imposed US citizenship on Indigenous people. In the same year, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act imposed national origins quotas . . . This restrictionist immigration policy, actively constructing national identity through race and racial difference, also prohibited the migration of Indigenous people from Canada to the US. This happened shortly after Crees and Chippewas from Canada and Yaquis from Mexico crossed into the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and launched political battles for federal tribal recognition to challenge the US state’s subjugation of them as “foreign Indians” and deportable “illegal immigrants.”60 Indigenous peoples were forced to relinquish kinship relations in the face of division by citizenship. Jenna M. Loyd, a scholar on the carceral system, sees citizenship as “always differentiated. It is a state institution and a set of practices that produce and mediate social difference on the basis of race, wealth, gender, and sexuality, among other categories.''61 For O’odham people, citizenship is one way in which the US uses the border to control their movement. For O’odham peoples, citizenship requirements are particularly thorny because of how their territory is cut into by the border. Emcee Liaison explains in a 2013 interview: “We’re supposed to be recognized as a sovereign nation through the United States, so we had tribal IDs which used to work for freely crossing the so-called border. But in this past year or two, they say these tribal IDs no longer work. But we have families on that side, we have ceremonies, but now they’re saying we can’t because we need all this fucking shit to get there and back. What about people like my grandfather, whose paperwork you need for a passport has been gone since the 40s and 50s, and he can’t prove his shit even though he’s been here and was in the military back in the day. It’s forcing people to reconsider and say, “Oh, we can’t cross that line.” And folks on the other side can’t come in because it’s militarized. So it seems like there’s this emphasis to regulate free movement compared to having open borders. If commodities and trade can go back and forth, why not people? It’s not about just the border, it’s about free trade, it’s 60 61 Walia, Border and Rule, 25. Loyd, Beyond Walls and Cages, 8. 24 about NAFTA. And people who aren’t red or black or brown, like regular white folks, are also affected by this. . . The root of it is capitalism.”62 This profiling, the asking for paper ID, is part of the militarization. In an interview in 2014, Liaison spoke about the invasion he’s seen within his own life. He connects the long presence of O’odham to the recent shifts along the border: “We’re still here, we have culture, our languages, our songs, our indigenous people are still here after all these centuries. Now we have the spook of border militarization . . . I’ve seen [the border] going from a chicken wire fence when I was 5 or 6 years old, to a vehicle barrier, to a vehicle barrier with a road next to it, and cameras all along the road, people patrolling up and down, day and night, and that’s just 25 years of my life.” Then he poses a question that is also a warning — "What’s it gonna look like when I’m 50 or 60?”63 Again in “PAPERS,” Shining Soul sings, “Enforcing arbitrary lines, vigilante militia / White supremacists come in many facets / And most a’ these bastards uphold the law and wear badges / Klik-Klakin’, point blank blastin’ / They killin’ in cold blood with impunity, no judge / Fuck that, we will not budge / They push, we push back / Watch these tables turn and witness the blowback / blowback / blowback / blowback.”64 This points out the “law” as part of the issue—the militarization, the profiling, is allowed. This O’odham critique undercuts this as a taken for granted part of borders. With the refusal to follow colonial bounding and the naming of Border Patrol’s presence as a militarization of O’odham lands comes the breaking-down of bordering practices. Then the O’odham call moves into the task at hand. 62 Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. Gibson, “Shining Soul: A Phoenix Hip-Hop Duo Raps on Border Militarization.” 64 “PAPERS by SHINING SOUL.” 63 25 In the roundtable on migrant and Indigenous struggles, Jennifer Denetdale (Diné) brought up a piece critical to conceptualize what OSABC calling out militarization and profiling does. “I think when we think about dismantling imperialism and settler colonialism, it seems like it's just a huge thing that is never going to happen and yet these colonial powers have to constantly remake themselves [emphasis mine],” Denetdale said. “It [imperialism] constantly has to assert its authority and its power because it's always being unsettled. And that is our work, to constantly unsettle and constantly trouble because we are not unmade yet. We remake ourselves over and over again.”65 Just as the physical materials of surveillance and the asking for papers are signs of the US trying to make the border permanent through militarization, the fact that it must be remade means that the border can also be unmade. 65 "Sovereignty and Sanctuary: A Roundtable." 26 Torpedo:66 Revolution The video opens at night, headlights shining on a “Be Prepared to Stop” road sign before the border checkpoint. This is Shining Soul’s 2014 title “No Mercy.” Clips from President Obama speaking on immigration interlace with Malcolm X’s words, “We are nonviolent with people who are non-violent with us. But we are not non-violent with anyone who is violent with us.” Rapidly spliced images take over, of migrants pinned to the ground, of aircraft flying low over the desert, of patrol trucks kicking up dust, of lasers beaming. A gruff voice reports, "The border patrol has more agents than ever, nearly 22,000, 651 miles of fence, 125 airplanes, and 6 drones patrolling the Mexican frontier, making a successful crossing more difficult than ever." The existcomes to a head and there’s a pause after a clip of Samuel Jackson in “Juice:” "Just cause you pour syrup on shit don't make it pancakes, you know what I'm saying?" Then the beat hits.67 ~ 66 67 Gibson, “Shining Soul: A Phoenix Hip-Hop Duo Raps on Border Militarization.” “Shining Soul- ‘No Mercy’ (Official Music Video,” video, May 25, 2014, 5:06, 00:59. 27 As the desert sun rose on October 5th of 2020, O’odham people set up a road blockade on one of the main routes for Border Patrol and public traffic. For four hours northbound and southbound traffic was brought to a halt, cars stretching out across the concrete that cuts over the dry ground. In videos from the blockade, piercing through the sound of stalled cars and revved engines is song — throaty and lilting, driven by the tap of a stick against a man’s palm. Men in hard hats kick up dust from the ground. A “FUCK BORDERS” banner stands out against red, a “No Borders on Stolen Land” sign is pinned to a canopy tent. Border Patrol trucks back up below a “Welcome to Arizona” roadside sign.68 Simultaneously, hundreds of individuals blasted the social media pages of the groups organizing the blockade with death threats, calling for cars to run over those in song. At least one truck drove through, spewing exhaust, just barely missing the tent and sending O’odham people and allies running.69 “White supremacists [were] proclaiming “run them over” and “build the wall” in response to the minor inconvenience of a temporary traffic delay,”70 Salomón, an O’odham organizer reflected, thus “illustrating that the wall is meant to facilitate White movement and non-White death.” Extending this, Walia underscores that “Asymmetry of movement is the condition of possibility for the West to exist.”71 It’s the patches with bright orange and yellow sun streaks that stand out against army green and black holsters in video footage of the clash a couple weeks after the 68 “Ally protest for O’odham against the wall,” vimeo, video, 2:52, October 2020, https://vimeo.com/465185151. “White drivers attempt to kill protesters with vehicles—hundreds of white supremacists attack O’odham social media with death threats demanding indigenous water protectors be run over,” Counterpunch News Service, October 9, 2020, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/09/white-drivers-attempt-to-kill-protestors-with-vehicles-hundreds-of-whitesupremacists-attack-oodham-social-media-with-death-threats-demanding-indigenous-water-protectors-be-run-over/. 70 Salomón, "Decolonizing the Disaster: Defending Land & Life During Covid-19." 71 “Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and Racist Nationalism,” Haymarket Books. 69 28 highway blockade. “Department of Public Safety” read the arms of men in rows, holding batons and taking formation, heavy at the hip with pistols. As the face-off came to a head, rubber bullets were sent into the crowd, and one O’odham man was held against the road.72 In the heat of the day, Nellie Jo David and Amber Ortega sat in the bucket of a bulldozer when the machinery was just yards from the spring.73 Upon arrest for impeding the construction site, they were driven for two hours past their homes in Ajo to Florence Correctional Complex.74 In an interview following her release, Jo David explained, “From there, it was a really confusing and scary moment for us, or two days, because we spent two days there. . . We were chained and handcuffed to our waist and around our feet. Reminded me of all the Operation Streamline proceedings that we witness here in Tucson. They happen every single day. We were not told what was happening. We asked for lawyers. We were not allowed to speak to one ’til the next day. We asked for phone calls. We were not given a phone call . . . going from that extreme heat in the Arizona desert to the extreme cold of the CoreCivic facility, we weren’t feeling too great.” 75 Asymmetrical control of movement brought to bear on O’odham people is mirrored by the asymmetrical application of the law. Jo David said, “they can wave laws and have this ultimate power in our homelands, in our territory, yet the laws apply to us in every way shape and form, even in our bodies, how CIVIC treats undocumented, all brown people people of color, [it’s] eye opening and enraging.”76 Direct action against the border was treated as a threat, and the water protectors whisked away into a cold facility. The actions held potential to disrupt the erection of steel barriers. Seen in the clashes, the 72 “Footage of O’odham tribal member getting shot by Arizona department of public safety,” vimeo, video, October 2020, 1:23, https://vimeo.com/468414474?fbclid=IwAR13GmpE_6ZFPT2ok9E5Oh9rlgpLSNtj04KILe1iP0U1LmPjJaNt-N3T4M. 73 “An Evening With O’odham Anti-Border Collective,” American Indian House Inc., September 15, 2020, video, 1:45:00, https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=605015140173967&ref=watch_permalink, 46:00. 74 “O’odham Land Defenders Lead Indigenous Resistance to Trump’s Border Wall Amid Militarized Crackdown,” Democracy Now! 75 Ibid. 76 “An Evening With O’odham,” 46:00. 29 defense of the steel beams, O’odham actions are threats. Following US carceral state scholar Loyd’s work, the disruptions at the border “challenge the idea that borders and prisons create safety, security, and order.”77 O’odham reveal that instead of securing the nation, the construction of the wall just continues US attempts to asymmetrically control peoples. There is a violent reaction from the US when O’odham fight against the border, because the O’odham actions threaten the border as an accepted entity. O’odham standing against the steel wall are snatched away and into chains; the solidarity threaded by O’odham is met with crackdown efforts because the O’odham call is dangerous to the US and its ability to constantly re-border itself. This stretches even further: Shining Soul’s track “No Mercy” came out before steel barriers were erected upon O’odham desert homelands. Militarization preceded the construction, and the violence is rooted not just in the steel, but in colonial bordering itself. This takes a refusal of those borders into the question of revolution. 77 Loyd, Beyond Walls and Cages, 8. 30 ~ Over the sounds of Border Patrol trucks, the high hum of bulldozers, and the driving off-beat in Shining Soul’s “No Mercy,” a low voice is audible: “We choose the right to be who we are, we know the difference between the reality of freedom and the illusion of freedom. There's a way to live with earth and a way not to live with earth. We choose the way of earth.” ~ "We from that home of the ‘Sí, se puede,’ house of the insurrection,” raps Chicano member of Shining Soul Bronze Candidate. “Borders patrol for economic control / recognize the fight is global / fight back, self-defense is a human right,” raps the group together. “The path has been laid, precinct to precinct / our communities have been militarized, open your eyes / what we need is a military response, a hood renaissance / with a heavy dose of upheaval.” In the music video for “No Mercy,” these words overlay footage of a 2000 detention center demonstration where gates were torn down and guards were overtaken. In an interview, Bronze Candidate said, "We showed videos of people getting free and liberating themselves," because the song is meant to "fight back in the face of a heightened police state in our city and in the face of a larger military presence.”78 Taking up Loyd’s work to undo the idea of prisons, of walls, as arbiters of security, Shining Soul paints a way forward. Loyd advises those who engage with border to issues focus on asymmetrical structural violence as written onto multiple peoples. “We have to be able to communicate the idea that both migrants and non-migrants are hurting right now, and it is neither’s 78 Gibson, “Shining Soul: A Phoenix Hip-Hop Duo Raps on Border Militarization.” 31 fault.”79 This, she posits, is a key “abolitionist tool,” a recognition of the way struggles are tied together that calls for solidarity. Professor of Chicana and Chicano studies Irene Vasquez attending the “Sovereignty and Sanctuary” roundtable said to “recognize that solidarities and alliances are a threat and that people will also work to end them. We have to create those relationships away from authoritative systems and structures.”80 This tool of calling out entangled struggles is wielded in Shining Soul’s songs again and again, expanding its reach to wrap in the lives of those migrating even as it never leaves what is particular to the O’odham struggle. “Speaking in first person, I am the native version of occupation, economic subversion / so I'm going insurgent all out against borders / I’m holding my peoples order, no borders,”81 raps Shining Soul. Loyd’s work attempts to link the criminalization of migrants to the carceral system; she impels “pro-immigrant activists to speak about immigration on a structural level . . . activist groups that underscore the ways that immigration law — similar to criminal law — disproportionately targets people of color for economic and political gain may effectively push groups and individuals in the general public to join the collective struggle for social, racial, and economic justice.”82 O’odham refusal and call for revolution against the border place the connection of the Indigenous and migrant struggle at center. Looking to history, the carceral tactics of settler colonialism have often used Indigenous lands. According to O’odham Anti-Border Collective member Amrah Salomón, “They’ve always put the incarceration of refugees and migrants on Indigenous 79 Loyd, Beyond Walls and Cages, 342. "Sovereignty and Sanctuary: A Roundtable." 81 “Shining Soul- ‘No Mercy.’” 82 Loyd, Beyond Walls and Cages, 187. 80 32 lands. In Akimel territory there were Japanese internment camps . . . There is a long history of this colonial government terrorizing and incarcerating black and brown people on Indigenous lands, and brutalizing Indigenous communities in order to brutalize someone else, so we need to have solidarity against mass incarceration, how it affects our African American relatives, how it affects our refugee and immigrant relatives.”83 The discussion amongst the roundtable speakers also emphasized that “the treatment of Indigenous people is at the foundation of how the US transits and traverses Empire. Its treatment of Indigenous people shapes and influences the way that it also treats other people of color.”84 A year before occupying BP headquarters, OSABC said “We hope to project true Indigenous/Migrant solidarity in the face of the state’s police oppression, and the immigration reform movement’s suppressive tactics to further marginalize the indigenous voice in border policies and colonial laws that affect us all.”85 Besides blocking movement, this underlines the profiling of O’odham in their homelands; the US militarization of their land also turns into a police state. Calls against racism and for solidarity were the third most common code appearing within the collective’s work. At the end of the music video for “No Mercy” is a black screen with words written in white: “This is a time to stop pleading for human rights and to start demanding justice. We need to identify and attack the root causes of the oppressions we face that continue to divide us internally as a movement.” 83 “An Evening With O’odham,” 59:00. Ibid. 85 “Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. 84 33 In 2011, Emcee Liaison posted on OSABC that “The Border Patrol is not the only agency responsible for the militarization of the border — and its subsequent destruction of Indigenous and migrant communities — or the only benefactors of border militarization.”86 This does not allow a stand only against BP, though that was the location of pressure for the Tucson occupation of Border Patrol headquarters. Instead, Liaison is driving home how border practices are part of a larger settler system, and that O’odham lifeways remind of a way outside and against this. Some O’odham peoples, including Liaison, locate how to think about borders: “We are in this together, and must start at the root of the problem, in this case [as it’s seen] from an O’odham perspective.”87 Walia has argued that “Racist nationalism in the US and other colonial states is built upon Indigenous nations and tethered to coercive power, not relationships to place or land . . . settler colonialism is the most violent form of far-right nationalism and stands in sharp contrast to Indigenous articulations of place, nationhood, kinship, and economies of reciprocity.”88 The O’odham case shows that against the partitions border violence brings to bear, an O’odham no borders perspective may “point to a vision of the future beyond state formations.”89 While Walia does not lay out how to get to this other possibility in the Southwestern borderlands, O’odham do. Shining Soul raps, “We revolutionary but indigenous / this means war so I'll see you on the front lines, shots for the one time, f-em-up bloodline / always a rebel never settle for the set-up / keep your head up and your heart open.”90 Walia’s work divulges what has been done to Indigenous peoples through bordering, but the O’odham call holds agency, it takes up the fight. 86 Ibid. Ibid. 88 Walia, Border and Rule, 212. 89 Ibid, 213. 87 90 “Shining Soul ‘No Mercy.’” 34 Walia reveals the history of bordering, and what lies beneath it; O’odham place this into the present moment, the blink of an eye of militarization, and pull another way forth. A way that calls for both heart and war. In Walia’s view, “Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable . . . whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law . . . We can weave solidarities through the lens of abundance, rather than scarcity.”91 Harkening back to the beginning of Shining Soul’s “No Mercy,” just because your pour syrup on something, it doesn’t make it pancakes. No matter what heights the US goes to in attempting to re-make methods of militarization, or control people with papers—the border isn’t set in place, permanent, or meant to be. Weaving in this way, like OABC, OSABC and Shining Soul do, can also seek to tear down the border—these O’odham resisters create conceptual tools and take material actions to stab, to open, to rupture the border. Their no borders politics can rupture and weave. 91 Ibid, 215. 35 Prick: Repair ~ There’s a twenty-foot banner with the words “Fight Back Against Racism” unfurled down the side of a parking garage in a video clip knitted into “PAPERS” by Shining Soul.92 Officers in black sunglasses appear on the scene, reaching to cut the cloth and tear it down. Even once they’ve split it in half, the message remains. ~ In the roundtable it was identified that some O’odham people “don't think that immigration is an issue that is our issue. And yet we all meet police violence the same ways. ‘No Ban on Stolen Land’ means we need to recognize the commonality of the kinds of violence—settler violence—that we meet. The ways in which we are all set up for elimination, for death. And ‘No Ban on Stolen Land’ means the construction of Indigeneity. There were movements of people before international borders. There were relationships not of the making of settler laws and policies. We have come to believe in 92 “PAPERS by SHINING SOUL,” 2:44. 36 white supremacy.”93 OSABC takes this up, voicing the idea that “The expansion of the attack on migrants, with its ubiquitous border cops and checkpoints, has spilled out onto indigenous communities and even those traveling the highways. Few are unaffected.”94 This is fastened to the demand to “End all racial profiling, No BP raid and deportations — Immediate and unconditional regularization (“legalization”) of all people.”95 In the face of the division of Indigenous and migrant struggles, the collective doesn’t collapse the profiling and policing into an equivalent issue, but draws upon particular foundational border violence to question the present day brutality: “When will the institutions, whose conduct continues for more than 500 years of trespassing, that terrorize indigenous and migrant communities, be held accountable?”96 This question is formed not just against the severing of Indigenous peoples from one another, but against the fracturing of Indigenous peoples and migrants. The phrasing “trespass” questions the right of the US to control people living in and crossing the desert; it calls out white movement that controls others. Instead of victimizing migrants and Indigenous peoples cut into by the borderline, the question of accountability tears down Border Patrol’s justification and claim to protect the US "homelands." Whose homelands, OSABC ask, letting the border’s foundation begin to cave in. Revealing the past, the present rationale for policing gives way. Walia has claimed that “The characterization of Indigenous people as a domesticated US “racial and ethnic minority group” . . . omits the inherently antiimperialist nature of Indigenous struggles” and homogenizes Indigenous peoples.97 The 93 "Sovereignty and Sanctuary: A Roundtable." Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Walia, Border and Rule, 26. 94 37 reality of O’odham resistance is that their fight for Indigenous liberation is a form of antiimperialist struggle. Simpson says that resurgent organizing “approaches the state from grounded normativity, from a reciprocal Indigenous recognition, from a place of strength. It comes at organizing from a completely different place: we are not begging the colonizer for attention, for money, for sympathy, for rights, for recognition, or for moral benevolence . . . We are the alternative. We are the solution”98 In this vein, early in 2010, a call for an Indigenous anti-authoritarian bloc was published: “We can remake the discussion from one of internal colonialism and self-sacrifice into one based on free movement, the resistance to dislocation and anticolonialism. We can introduce ideas of self-organization, autonomy and direct action, as well as criticisms of Capital and the State. We can shatter the death grip of the movement zombies and make a move towards building a force that can challenge more than just one sheriff in once county in Arizona. We think the argument for free movement and against dislocation offer opportunities that currently elude the movement because of the inherent limitations of the debate as it now is being presented. The demand for free movement represents a rejection of all controls on travel and necessarily subverts the ever-expanding reach of the State and Capital. Likewise, the opposition to dislocation offers a framework on which to build resistance.”99 Walia also has made the claim that “We must wage resistance to displacement and immobility in all its forms: drone warfare, military occupations, policing agencies, mass incarceration, reservations, ghettos, gentrification, capitalist trade agreements, special economic zones, sweatshops, land grabs, resource extraction, and temporary labor programs.”100 The work of OSABC and Shining Soul do the shucking work, stripping back the husks of steel, of towers with roaming cameras, of the trucks speeding by; they 98 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 237. Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity," O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective. 100 Walia, Border and Rule, 213. 99 38 insist upon humans moving across the desert as a right. Where before there was a border thought to be formed, to be stable, their work pops it, letting all the air out of the border. ~ The embodied, on-the-ground weaving of an O’odham no border politics is about hitching together coresistance to policing. For O’odham, it comes out of the claims to land, critique of settlers trespassing and a stance against bordering tactics brought into the present through tactics of material militarization. The O’odham stance against the border remembers and relies on the claims to movement beneath the police state on O’odham lands. From the perspective of Nishnaabeg author Simpson, “How is a pretty important concept in Indigenous thought because it reminds us that the outcome is different if Indigenous peoples create the alternatives on our own terms, on the ground, rather than relying on the state. It also matters with whom we achieve liberation.”101 The importance in the “how” of bringing about opposition to the border carves the powerful shape of O’odham no borders politics precisely because it is grounded—in the particular, in the togetherness. Yes, solidarity, but solidarity with bite. It’s revolution alongside refusal. It’s repair alongside puncture. 101 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 229. 39 In “ALL DAY,” Shining Soul’s 2016 track, the members rap: “Invading my rez like conquistadores crusading for corridors / road to riches to explore, and some call it reform, but yo I call it war.”102 The music video footage includes O’odham people holding signs like “No One for President,” and the lyrics talk about putting politics aside. In OSABC’s posts, they write often against reform, against solutions that only serve to re-entrench colonial ways of bordering. They refuse to be captured by “solutions.” “I think it’s evident the rule of law is a definite impediment to all human settlement / I’m searching for that betterment / I ain’t got answers, all I have is questions, so I keep it trucha, cause they stay talking that minutiae / . . . I put the politics aside as they continue to divide and conquer.”103 Simpson argues that “Radical resurgent organizing refuses both settler colonialism and its many manifestations. It does not allow settler colonialism to frame the issues facing Indigenous peoples, and this is critical because settler colonialism will 102 Ibid. “Shining Soul ‘ALL DAY’ (Offiicial Music Video),” video, 4:56, February 20, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIaGI1L00Co. 103 40 always define the issues with a solution that reentrenches its own power. Radical resurgent organizing refuses the politics of recognition as a mechanism to bring about change, and it is generative.”104 She is talking about recognition by US or Canadian nations. An O’odham no borders stance pushes this: they refuse a politics of recognition that uses reservations and citizenship. Solutions that include Indigenous rights by way of TON may still further criminalization of both O’odham and migrant communities. An O’odham no border politics is weary and cautious of immigration reform—and in moments warns forcibly against it. “Militarization now is the state of my lands, and the judicial system is not the answer. I wrote this to educate my fellow O’odham, and those who stand in solidarity with us, so we can construct ideas that may, or may not work in their system. Hopefully, this understanding of the issue will lead to a bigger debate. Not just the same colonial one that is offered by them,”105 reads one post. This position centers Shining Soul’s questions, moving against the proposal of uncritical solutions that may be used to continue border violence. Shining Soul does not rap for reform. In addition to a critique of reform, Shining Soul’s member Bronze Candidate is critical of how solidarity is formed. He thinks through how coresistance for collective liberation is formed. “It’s that allegiance to what we call whiteness. Because that gives you privilege over people who are darker than you. And at the end of the day, I mean, you don’t want to be criminalized for being poor. You want to pass the buck to someone else. And look at who’s historically been marginalized and how violence has been projected upon certain groups of individuals. I’m a Chicano, I come from generations in the valley of what we call Phoenix. I’m pretty much a desert person as well. But three generations is not that long, people like my boy Alex, MC 104 105 Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 178. Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity.” 41 Liaison, he’s been here since time immemorial. So what does that look like when I’m trying to claim space here?”106 This goes where none of the theory on intersecting struggles on the southern borderlands have gone, because it is grounded—it is indispensably based in place, in one spot in the desert—yet at the same time this no borders position insists on wrapping the lives of those migrating into its core. It is both close to the ground and expansive in possibility. Walia has written that “In contrast to the inaccurate framing of “We are a nation of immigrants,” the more subversive chant “We did not cross the border, the border crossed us” destabilizes the southern border by interrogating the assumption of “migrant” on seized lands and exposing the hypocrisy of colonizers calling people “illegals.”107 O’odham organizers and artists do not stop at destabilizing the border, or just uncovering the hypocrisy—though they do both. They transform it into a question: “Ask yourself, what does an anti-colonial migrant/Indigenous response to this all look like? What does a world without NAFTA borders look like? What does collective liberation look like on O’odham lands? Lipan Apache Lands? Yoeme Lands? Kickapoo Lands?”108 These questions strengthen and map out a solidarity, a collective liberation, on Indigenous lands and with the O’odham who stand upon it. This in turn brings together struggles, forging coresistance with those migrating and sharpening it in order to strike the border. 106 Gibson, “Shining Soul: A Phoenix Hip-Hop Duo Raps on Border Militarization.” Walia, Border and Rule, 23. 108 Indigenous/Migrant Solidarity.” 107 42 Conclusion “We from that ground zero, anti-heros / saying that shit that you can't say like smash borders, chinga la migra, middle finger to la linea / we from that desert borough, we keep it thorough / saying that shit that you can't say like smash borders, chinga la migra, middle finger to la linea.”109 Shining Soul seizes the border in their songs and crack it with their beats and enunciated lines. Their work, along with O’odham AntiBorder Collective and O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective, never pose O’odham people as a “border tribe.” They don’t suggest that discussion of “open borders” is sufficient. Their call is unabashedly “no borders.” Salomón writes of the borderlands crisis: “These are not indecipherable catastrophes constructed by the hand of God; they are man-made crises and as such, they can be undone . . . If time is circular and all of its tenses exist together all at once as many Indigenous epistemologies instruct, then our future is within our hands now, uncolonized, unending, a seed pregnant with possibility.”110 O’odham incubate a no borders future, drawn from the desert they have always called home. Instead of relaxing into new presidencies, they ask more questions. In January of 2021, an Arizona resolution incorporated funding to Indigenous peoples whose sacred sites were torn up by border construction.111 President Biden rescinded some of the Trump administration’s immigration measures. Journalist Max Granger warns that, “Central to this more “humane” immigration plan, however, is an increase in funding for border enforcement: more militarization of border communities, 109 “PAPERS by Shining Soul.” Salomón, "Decolonizing the Disaster: Defending Land & Life During Covid-19.” 111 Gary Paul Nabhan & Austin Nunez, “Along the Southwest Border, Trump’s Wall Is Only One of the Insults He Left Behind,” NYT, February 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/opinion/border-wall-trump.html. 110 43 more criminalization of undocumented crossers, and, ultimately, more death and suffering in the desert.”112 The sigh of relief into what has always been done is dangerous. The work of those O’odham writing, singing, fighting against the border is more prescient than ever. The O’odham refusal is from the homelands, not the bounds used to divide O’odham from each other and from those migrating through the desert. These artists and organizers trace the roots of bordering practices not just in their history, but into the present moment of intense militarization. Against the settler desire to erect walls and fix an enemy, they ask for accountability that is not carceral, but expansive. They thread together specific coresistance, creating tools to ask questions outside the limits of discussions on reform. In “ALL DAY,” Shining Soul raps, “We seek the womb / only all of us together / can be the blade that severs / the tentacles forever.”113 With the magnitude of displacement and immobility crises, it’s hard to know where to begin. An O’odham no borders stance begins to fracture border thinking, and erupts the border debate. An O’odham no borders politics unties and weaves at the same time—because beneath is another way, but the border must be untied in the midst of a messy world. Taken together, O’odham puncture the border in this one spot. This one spot may begin to unsettle others. It is necessarily imperfect, it’s not yet fully formed. It is a prick and a repair woven together on O’odham lands. Shining Soul speak of heart and of upheaval in the same breath. 112 113 Granger, “The Border Patrol Is Leaving Migrants to Die.” “Shining Soul ‘ALL DAY.’” 44 Bibliography “Ally protest for O’odham against the wall,” vimeo, video, 2:52, October 2020. https://vimeo.com/465185151. “An Evening With O’odham Anti-Border Collective,” American Indian Community House Inc. September 15, 2020. 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