"Why I Speak Out" Testimonies from Lipan Apache Elder, Eloisa Garcia Tamez

By Melissa del Bosque, "All Walled Up", Texas Observer, January 20, 2010, at http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/all-walled-up/.

Native Peoples in the U.S., Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico Border Communities are Neither Hispanics Nor Latinos

ARGUING WITH XENOPHOBE BEAR ON RACISM ALONG THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER AND INTERIOR

THE HYPOCRISY OF THANKS-TAKING AND PERSISTENT ANTI-INDIGENOUS (ANTI-"MEXICAN") BIGOTRY
Film, by Time Wise.

TESTIFY PROJECT: U.S. ABUSES AND VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Testify Project
"It is time for people in the United States to make their voices heard at the United Nations. The Testify Project collects stories of injustice from throughout the United States through one-minute video and one-page written testimony. The top videos and stories will be screened for United Nations delegates in Geneva, Switzerland during the United States’ Universal Periodic Review.

CORE QUESTION: How are human rights violated in your community? OPTIONAL QUESTION: What should the US Government do to protect these rights?

Videos and written testimony should tell us about human rights violations in your community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) specifies many rights everyone has simply by being human, such as the right to life, liberty and security of person (Article 3), freedom from arbitrary arrest (Article 9), freedom of thought and religion (Article 18), right to form and join unions (Article 23) and right to an adequate standard of living (Article 25). You can read a full version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=eng, or a simplified version at www.adcq.qld.gov.au/pubs/UDHR_easyrefguide.rtf.

GET INVOLVED AND ORGANIZE! For more instructions about how to write, submit written statements, and/or how to make a youtube video and upload it to the Testify Project, click!

ORIGINARIOS, INDIGENOUS, FIRST NATION, PUEBLOS INDIGENAS, COMUNIDADES TRADICIONALES, BANDAS LIPANES, BANDAS TLAXCALTECAS ANCIANOS, INMIGRANTES INDIGENAS Y CAMPESINOS, PEOPLES OF LOWER RIO GRANDE VALLEY IMPACTED BY THE BORDER WALL, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE HORRIFIC EFFECTS OF FLOODING, LOSS OF LIVELIHOOD, RACIST, SEXIST, CLASSIST DISCRIMINATION BY GOVERNMENT AND LOCAL AUTHORITY, AND ON-GOING IMPACTS OF THE MILITARIZATION OF THE COMMUNITY: Lipan Apache Women Defense calls upon you.

PLEASE--if you desire to walk side by side and in ALLIANCE with Indigenous Peoples working on human rights and Indigenous Rights based upon the local community protocols of governance, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as key frameworks for strengthened and empowered communities, the dismantling of the Border Wall, the return of Indigenous lands, and return of Indigenous local authority and vision for sustainable communities: CONTACT US! sumalhepa.nde.defense@gmail.com

NATIVE PEOPLES & ARIZONA SB1070

The American Indian Program at Cornell University presents a Roundtable Discussion on Arizona SB1070 and its impacts on Native Peoples.

Date: Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Place: Goldwin Smith Hall, Room 142
Time: 4:30-6:00 p.m.

Light Refreshments to follow.

Panelists:

Dr. Margo Tamez (Lipan Apache) – Assistant Professor and Faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies and Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia, Department of Community, Culture & Global Studies. Her research areas include the Indigenous peoples and Indigenous women from the regions currently bifurcated by the U.S.-Mexico border, and decolonial Indigenous historical perspectives of Nde’ and Nnee’ (‘Apache’) peoples of the Texas-Mexico border region.

Michael Flores (Tohono O’odham from GuVo) – Community organizer in border communities in and near Arizona. He has served three terms on his Tribal Council, and as a Board Member of the International Indian Treaty Council.

Dr. Alan Eladio Gómez (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) - Historian and Assistant Professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University. He writes about the history of social movements in Mexico, the U.S. and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands; and the political cultures of U.S./Third World Left radicalism.

Facilitator:
Dr. Verónica Martínez-Matsuda (PhD in Borderlands/U.S. History, University of Texas at Austin)– Visiting Professor in Cornell ILR. She has held fellowship positions at Bryn Mawr College, Rhodes College, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Her current research examines the role of the Migratory Labor Camp Program, established and managed by the U.S. Government during the late 1930s and early 1940s, in the lives of migrant farm worker families.

Co-sponsors: ILR International and Comparative Labor Department; ILR Labor Relations, Law, and History Department; Latino Studies Program; Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies research group; and Wells College Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

U.S.-MEXICO MILITARIZATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES & LANDS ON GUATEMALA-MEXICO BORDER/ENGLISH-SPANISH

IN ENGLISH

INFO WARS

EN ESPANOL
Voces Mayos
La Jornada

LAW Defense Statement to the U.S. Social Forum

STATEMENT OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER,
LOWER RIO GRANDE RIVER, EL CALABOZ RANCHERÍA,
TO THE U.S. SOCIAL FORUM (2010) REPRESENTATIVES
Greetings!
The Lipan Apache Women Defense (LAW-Defense), an Indigenous Peoples Organization (IPO), established in 2007, and a Texas-Mexico border human rights working group, co-founded by Eloisa Garcia Tamez and Margo Tamez, is located in the heartland of Nde' shimaa hada'didla ('lands of the lightning people clans), in El Calaboz Rancheria. We exercise the right to pursue all the venues available and to create new ones for the application of customary laws of Indigenous peoples, human rights and international law, and the United Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
LAW-Defense welcomes and invites partnerships to work productively for Indigenous Peoples‟ pursuit of “self-determination, land and natural resources, cultural rights and sacred sites protection, subsistence, Treaty rights, health and social services, non-discrimination, environmental protection, education, language, and many others which Indigenous Peoples identified as essential to their dignity, survival and well-being.”1
At this time, LAW-Defense calls upon our sisters and brothers participating in the 2010 U.S. Social Forum to join us in the sustained interrogation of the human rights violations committed by the United States of America along the Texas-Mexico border in its construction of an 18 foot tall steel, concrete reinforced wall across Indigenous Peoples lands.
LAW-Defense calls upon the U.S. Social Forum participants to support the self-determination processes of the diverse Indigenous communities who are directly impacted and irreparably harmed by the U.S. border wall construction which unfolded, between 2006-2009 in community-held lands.
We call upon you to work productively and in partnership to articulate this year, at the 2010 U.S. Social Forum, the multiple ways in which the U.S.-Mexico border militarization and the Texas-Mexico border wall impacts workers, families, women, children, elders, the sick, rural agrarian societies, subsistence societies, family-based livelihoods, traditional trade and commerce, biodiversity, traditional stewardship of sacred sites and natural resources, the dissemination of both traditional and contemporary knowledge systems, and the human rights of Indigenous peoples with Aboriginal Title across the vast region. (Articles 20 and 21, UNDRIP)

Read full statement here

O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective: Indigenous Perspectives & Principles on Arizona SB 1070

On Tuesday, April 27, 2010, the O'odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective (OSABC) provided critical and incisive analysis about SB 1070 from Indigenous Peoples impacted directly. A youth movement with tangible roots connected to the larger human rights and Indigenous rights social movements across the U.S.-Mexico border region led by Native American and Pueblos Indigenas, OSABC is leading a vibrant challenge to the privileges of the settler colonial power structure across North America.

LAW-DEFENSE SUPPORTS CONTINENTAL MAY 1 MARCH

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LAW-DEFENSE IN SOLIDARITY WITH PUEBLOS INDIGENAS TRANSFRONTERIZAS SONORA-ARIZONA

COMMENTARY: UNITED NATIONS PERMANENT FORUM ON INDIGENOUS ISSUES (UNPFII), 2010

From April 19 through April 30, 2010, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues will be in session.

Statements (interventions) submitted to the Permanent Forum are available here. And, this service is provided by doCip (Indigenous Peoples' Center for Documentation, Research and Information.)

Access to the UNPFII is quite difficult for the common Indigenous peoples--from regional and national meetings (where agendas are established and set)to transnational meetings (where hemispheric understandings are shaped) to the annual UNPFII session (where Indigenous delegates shape the 'voice' of Indigenous communities.

The politics of access continue to incise and sculpt the disparities and unbalance reflected in Indigenous self-determination movements, and at times gloss over how much at odds community-level analysis differs from elites' articulations of 'crisis.' While 'self-determination' and 'sovereignty' continue to be defined through normative Western political-science frameworks within U.N. realms, the lack of will by Indigenous delegates to challenge 'sovereignty' as an artifact of Western thought and to determine frameworks that disrupt normative sovereignty is nowhere to be seen in this year's opening statements.

Indigenous communities defending themselves against intensified violence and the use of violence by states, nations and nations-within-nations (the Indigenous polity) is hyperperipheralized, again.

The use of normative sovereignty to evade the ways in which 'sovereignty' is used daily as an umbrella to glaze over the ways in which--locally, regionally, nationally, and globally--Indigenous polities are not innocent of their enmeshments with the state, and not innocent of the use of this legal platform to exert violence against their own--is marginalized. And, this is crucial because most indigenous peoples experience violence intimately, in their closest environs--where the Indigenous polity of the household, community center, council, is entangled with the violence of the state.

Indigenous communities challenging deep militarization--at the bordered peripheries of the 'core', are increasingly pushing back on the tightening of the fist around the throat of their communities by oligarchical polities and challenging this across entire regions (comprised of both non-Indigenous and Indigenous leadership). The communiites experiencing physical, economic, and penetrating psychological violence as a result of violent dispossessions, displacements, and persecutions through the apparatus of the state working with and through the nation-within-the-nation sort of violence absolutely threaten the ideation that Indigenous sovereignty is utopic and unscathed. The voices from below are indicators that 'Indigenous sovereignty' and its discontents--must be allowed open debate, and put up for scrutiny if true self-determination and autonomy will ever gain traction among the common people--who are at best skeptical of the UNPFII larger impact on the Indigenous peoples from below.

Restoring Lipan Apache Women's Laws, Lands, and Strength in El Calaboz Rancheria at the Texas-Mexico Border

Published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2010, vol. 35, no. 3, The University of Chicago.
Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Indigenous Feminisms

Abstract: Ndé gową goshjaa (Lipan Apache families or clan relations) produce a significant portion of indigenous alliances and resistances to imperialism, colonization, industrialization, and militarization in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. The visibility of Ndé isdzáné (Lipan Apache women) in the Lower Rio Grande Valley changed radically after the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006. In this essay, I speak from my position as one of the cofounders of the Lipan Apache Women Defense and as the third‐born daughter of vocal and consistent leaders of the reemergent Ndé isdzáné in the traditional territories of the Ndé. My analysis is not meant to substitute for the important analysis of local matrilineal leaders, nor is it meant to be static. Rather, as an Ndé isdzáné scholar, I must allow the space to make and to know the people, politics, histories, events, and meanings as they continue to unfold. I believe that Ndé isdzáné, as a basis for Ndé activism (which includes supportive brothers) and as a category of analysis, furthers the work of feminism in U.S., North American, indigenous, and global indigenous human rights defense work. Investigating the histories of our indigenous foremothers—respecting and acknowledging community‐based rights, wishes, and aspirations—challenges Ndé women and our allies to reflect on the rights work of contemporary indigenous women in militarized and state‐occupied policing zones and their roles and challenges as political actors in extreme struggles against economic enslavement, dispossession, land theft, vital resource deprivation, environmental destruction, detention, rape, racialized sexism, indentured servitude, and casta.