[News] Sixty-nine graves of O'odham ancestors desecrated for border wall

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Sixty-nine graves of O'odham ancestors desecrated for border wall

Posted by 
<http://narcosphere.narconews.com/users/brenda-norrell>Brenda Norrell 
- January 21, 2009 at 2:03 am
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2009/01/sixty-nine-graves-oodham-ancestors-desecrated-border-wall

By Brenda Norrell

NOGALES, Ariz. -- Homeland Security destroyed 69 graves of Tohono 
O'odham ancestors in one location alone while constructing the 
US/Mexico border wall south of Tucson, in violation of all federal 
laws created to protect American Indian remains.

Homeland Security and US courts waived all federal laws to protect 
Native American graves and the environment and then allowed for 
border wall construction at San Pedro near Nogales. The graves were 
violated and the details were not made public.

Although the archaeologist exposing the desecration only revealed it 
as a rare find, for O'odham, these are the graves of their ancestors 
which were destroyed.

Archaeologist Maren Hopkins said the village is believed to have 
existed from around A.D. 700 to 1200.
"Archaeologists found: 23 pit houses, 14 possible pit houses, 97 
thermal pits, a number of storage pits, five dog burials and 69 human 
burials. As is customary in this region, the human remains have been 
repatriated to the Tohono O'Odham Indian Reservation," according to 
the Nogales International newspaper.

In October 2007, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff pushed 
ahead with the fence, winning federal court approval to waive federal laws.

In another location in May of 2007, the contractor Boeing dug up 
O'odham ancestors on Tohono O'odham Nation land, southwest of Sells, 
Arizona. Although the Tohono O'odham Nation did not make the 
desecration public, O'odham Ofelia Rivas exposed the destruction of 
O'odham graves. The ancestors were reburied at this location.

The U.S. has not revealed the total number of Native American graves 
that were dug up and destroyed while building the US/Mexico border 
wall after the US waived all federal laws. The border divides the 
traditional homelands of many Indigenous Peoples, including the 
Kumeyaay in California, the Cocopah and Tohono O'odham in Arizona and 
the Tigua at Ysleta del Sur in El Paso, Texas. Near Brownsville, 
Texas, the Lipan Apache continue to fight the seizure of lands by 
Homeland Security for the border wall.

The region south of Tucson, where 69 graves were desecrated by 
Homeland Security, is the same region where the Israeli Apartheid 
corporation Elbit Systems was subcontracted by Boeing for border spy 
technology. Elbit also performed work on the Apartheid Wall of Israel 
and provided unmanned aerial vehicles to patrol the US border in 
southern Arizona.

Those drones were based at Fort Huachuca, where protesters have 
protested the US Army Intelligence Center's role in torture in Iraq 
and Afghanistan. Army personnel responsible for torture in Abu Ghraib 
were trained at Fort Huachuca. Earlier, Fort Huachuca was the 
location of the publication of the School of Americas' torture 
training manuals, made public in 1996, responsible for the murder, 
rape and torture of masses in Central and South American in the 1980s 
and 1990s. An unknown number of Indigenous Peoples and farmers were 
tortured and executed as their lands were seized for corporations.

Read more of the Nogales International article:

<http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2009/01/20/news/doc4975f30441897554681215.txt>http://www.nogalesinternational.com/articles/2009/01/20/news/doc4975f30441897554681215.txt




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