The United States' Apartheid Wall is under construction on Tohono O'odham Nation lands, shown here at the San Miguel Gate.
Minutes after this photo was taken, a delegation of Mohawks and other Native people stood before the Border Patrol with fists held high in solidarity and would have intervened in the arrest of Mayans, if the Border Patrol had not packed the Mayans into a vehicle and sped away.
Delegates from the Indigenous Peoples' Border Summit of the Americas were disgusted to see the border wall going up on Indian land; the "cage" where men women and children are held on Indian land; and the arrests of Mayans, mostly women and children, on Tohono O'odham land.
"We saw it all firsthand in America," said Bill Means, Lakota and cofounder of the International Indian Treaty Council on Nov. 8, when an Indigenous delegation went to the [so-called] "US/Mexico" border here, south of Sells, to document human rights abuses [including murders, rapes, torture, deaths] for a report to the United
Nations.
We are going to take this wall down," Means said, after viewing the construction of a "border vehicle barrier" by contractors and National Guard on Tohono O'odham land. [This wall is something to see. It is iron posts filled with cement, sunk 5 ft. into the ground and 6 1/2 ft. high. it is going to be electrified.]
Speaking a few hours later to the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit of the Americas II in San Xavier, Means called for solidarity of Indigenous Peoples throughout the world to halt the arrests of Indigenous Peoples who are walking north in search of a better life, and solidarity to bring down the US/Mexico border wall.
"One inch of intrusion into our land is not acceptable!" Mohawk Mark Maracle told the Border Summit. "I became very angry when I saw those guys rounding up our people. It is a violation of our Great Law to witness what we saw today and do nothing about it."