A té qík'xyé toj nin k'ul ex toj chg'ajlaj When We Cross the Mountains and Desert
Indigenous Forced Migration in Abiayala B ELOW: Mam, Kachiquel, Q'eqchi', O'odham, Cherokee, Kickapoo, Comanche, Macehual, Hopi, Ecuadoran, Mexican,and Purepeché Peoples' consultation in Shuck Shon. Photo by Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras.
Photo courtesy of International Maya League.
Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras, International Mayan League, and Indigenous Languages Office
O
ur stories are threaded in the movement of our Peoples across worlds and dimensions, and continue to emerge despite forced migration from wars against us, massacres, and the Trail of Tears. To survive is to remain who we are on our own terms. More than 500 years of colonization, land dispossession, and genocide has created forced displacement from our ancestral lands throughout Turtle Island, Ixim Ulew-Abiayala. Our languages, ceremonies, cosmovisions, and right to exist as distinct Peoples and Nations have been under attack from imposed systems and governments, an invasion so strong that it almost killed us through forced denial of our identity, structural erasure, and genocide. We continue to fight for our identity and survival against inhumane laws and policies that still impose borders, ideologies, and governments over our lands and bodies. Our convergence as Indigenous Peoples, advocates, and knowledge gatherers fighting for our rights in forced migration began in the historical moment of the wars and genocide in Ixim Ulew (the Land of the Corn), Guatemala in the late 1970s. Some of us were targets of the war and forced to flee; others worked in the underground railroad of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s. Some of us reported the stories of genocide in Guatemala, and many of us experienced death threats. Indigenous Peoples entered the Sonoran Desert, the original lands of the O’odham people, as the genocide raged in Guatemala in the early 1980s. During this time more than 200,000 people, the majority Maya, were killed or disappeared, and more than 1.5 million were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands. 10 • www. cs. org
The Sanctuary Movement started in Tucson, Arizona in March 1982, a way station for Indigenous immigrants, to reveal to the rest of the United States that Indigenous immigrants were fleeing genocide. Forced migration of Indigenous Peoples is a direct outcome of past and present day marginalization, conflicts over lands and resources, racist and discriminatory laws and policies, debilitating poverty, imposed development, and now, climate change. Indigenous Abiayala is in movement again—asylum seekers, refugees, migrants—yet we remain invisible. Indigenous Peoples’ migration experience is characterized by unique vulnerabilities, which stem from our Indigenous identity and the intersection of discrimination, racism, and language. The government continues to erase our story and identity through policies and by statistical omission that denies our identities as original peoples of this continent. We are subsumed into nation-state citizenship, our Indigenous stories contained, denied our right to our original languages that emerged from all over the living natural worlds of this continent. For Indigenous Peoples from what is today Mexico, Central, and South America, we are misclassified as Latino, Hispanic, Latinx, and Indigenous Latino/Hispanic; all of All photos by Joshua Cooper.
