For 4 hours, Raymond V. Buelna, a cultural chief for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, sat on a metallic bench in a concrete holding area on the U.S.-Mexico border, separated from the 2 folks he was taking to an Easter ceremony on tribal land in Arizona and questioning once they may be launched.
It was February 2022 and Buelna, a U.S. citizen, was driving the pair – each from the sovereign Native American nation’s associated tribal group in northwestern Mexico – from their house to the reservation southwest of Tucson. They’d been approved by U.S. officers to cross the border. But when Buelna requested an agent why they had been detained, he was advised to attend for the officer who introduced him in.
“They know that we’re coming,” mentioned Buelna, who has made the journey for a wide range of ceremonies for 20 years. “We did all this work and then we’re still sitting there.”
Now, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe is attempting to vary this – for themselves and probably dozens of different tribes within the U.S.
Tribal officers have drafted rules to formalize the border-crossing course of, working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s not too long ago fashioned Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council, comprised of 15 Native officers throughout the U.S.
Their work may present a template for dozens of Native American nations whose homelands, just like the Pascua Yaquis, had been sliced in two by modern-day U.S. borders.
If accepted, the principles would change into the primary clearly established U.S. border crossing procedures particular to a Native American tribe that might then be utilized by others, in response to Christina Leza, affiliate professor of anthropology at Colorado College.
The rules would final 5 years, to be renewed and amended as wanted, and require coaching native U.S. Customs and Border Protection brokers and consular personnel on the tribe’s cultural heritage, language and traditions. It would require a Yaqui interpreter to be accessible when wanted. It additionally would require shut coordination with the tribe so border crossings are immediate.
“This is just something that will help everybody,” mentioned Fred Urbina, legal professional normal for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. “It will make things more efficient.”
Urbina mentioned the tribe has met with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in regards to the proposal. DHS didn’t instantly reply to repeated requests for remark by cellphone and electronic mail on the standing of the rules.
When relations, deer dancers or musicians dwelling in Sonora, Mexico, make the journey into the U.S. for ceremonies, tribal recognition celebrations or household occasions, they’re sometimes issued an ID card from the tribe and a customer visa or parole allow from the U.S. authorities. Still, they nonetheless face border officers who they are saying lack the cultural consciousness to course of them with out issues.
In the final two years, Buelna mentioned, he has made the roundtrip about 18 occasions and was detained on 4 of them. He mentioned border officers query the folks he’s escorting, whose first language is Yaqui, with out an interpreter, and cultural objects, resembling deer and pig hooves, have been confiscated. Officials have touched ceremonial objects, regardless of solely sure folks being permitted by the tribe to take action.
Urbina defined that the tribe encountered new challenges when Homeland Security was fashioned after 9/11 and border safety was heightened. It turned extra pronounced in 2020, when the U.S. prohibited “non-essential” journey throughout the border to regulate the unfold of the coronavirus. That ban ended this week, however new restrictions are in place.
As a sovereignty subject, Native American nations ought to be capable to decide their folks’s capability to cross the border to protect the ceremonial lifetime of their communities, Leza mentioned.
“If the federal government is saying our particular priorities, our interests in terms of securing our borders, trump your interests as a sovereign nation, then that’s not really a recognition of the sovereignty of those tribal nations,” she mentioned.
Tribes alongside the U.S.-Canada border face related issues.
The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians is headquartered in Michigan, however 173 of its greater than 49,000 enrolled members reside in Canada. Kimberly Hampton, the tribe’s officer-secretary and vice chair of the Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council, mentioned these members cross the border for powwows, fasting and to go to with conventional healers and household, however border officers have rudely rifled by means of eagle feathers and different cultural objects they’re carrying.
Hampton needs an settlement that features having tribal liaisons at border crossings and coaching developed by the tribe for border personnel.
Members of the Sault Ste. Marie tribe and the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which has about 8,000 members within the U.S. and about 8,000 in Canada, mentioned they’ve additionally been requested on the border to show that they possess not less than 50% “blood of the American Indian race.” It stems from a requirement underneath the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that “American Indians” born in Canada can’t be denied entry into the U.S. if they will show this – typically by means of a letter from the tribe.
Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe Chief Michael L. Conners needs to get rid of the requirement and enhance training for border brokers on native and nationwide tribal points. Drafting rules particular to the tribe, like those the Pascua Yaqui are doing, “would bring a lot of peace of mind to our whole community,” he mentioned.
For Buelna, ready in that concrete holding area, he was reunited with the pair solely after he advised a border official he thought they’d been neglected following a shift change, he mentioned.
“Why can’t there be a system?” Buelna requested. “Why can’t there be already a line for us where we can present the proper paperwork, everything that we need and go about our way?”
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