Tohono

Tohono

by Meena Venkataramanan

As a freelance immigration and border journalist from Southern Arizona, I spent last summer exploring the U.S.-Mexico border and the hands that shape it. In June, I visited the Tohono O’odham Reservation, which neighbors my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, to speak to O’odham activists about their struggle against the proposed border wall and increased border militarization on tribal lands. I have been interested in indige nous issues for some time now, especially given the unique, shared history between American Indians like the O’odham people and Indian Americans like myself that has largely resulted from both the events of 1492 and the scars of colonization and genocide in America that continue to shape today’s political and social climate. This piece strives to explore this complicated, shared history through the lens of my personal experiences vis iting the Tohono O’odham reservation in June and as an Indian American woman growing up on stolen land that is, has always been, and will forever be shaped by indigenous cultures and perspectives.

You are almost there when you get to the Border Patrol checkpoint.

“Checkpoint Trauma,” as it is called by the Tohono O’odham people who are regularly pulled over, sniffed by hounds, strip-searched by chalky, uncertain hands under the glaring beam of their own headlights.

Our cameras are aimed squarely at the agents when our car rolls to a gentle halt that belies our tightening throats, pounding hearts.

The four of us—all women, three Asian and one white—are not stopped.

“Have a good one, ladies,” the agent, who is white, says after giving us a perfuncto ry once-over. We are filming him because we can.

We park at the Sells 86 Diner. Neon Coca-Cola signs blink from off-white walls. The faint smell of cigarettes crawls in from the Shell gas station next door. Every one here is O’odham, with the exception of the four of us and an elderly white man who works for Tribal EMS.

The line cook wears a Washington Redskins hat.

The Sells 86 Diner sits along the AZ-86 Highway in Sells, Arizona, one hour southwest of Tucson.

In second grade, no one bothered to tell me I was a different kind of Indian. I wasn’t the kind we learned about every year around Thanksgiving, making con struction paper cutouts of turkeys and colored-pencil cornucopias.

It was the time of year when we would write out a list of things we were thankful for, the first being getting three days off school to eat pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes with family (or, in my case, basmati rice and daal with my parents). The time of year when we were told we celebrate this holiday because, as the story went, it emerged from a truce between the Pilgrims and the Indians.

I was the kind of Indian whose parents had come from a country on the other side of the world, as I eventually learned to describe it to my friends.

At lunchtime, we would sit on circular red stools affixed to a long cafeteria table as I slowly spooned potato curry from my pink Thermos, trying to explain what I meant.

This was Tucson, Arizona in 2006, and I couldn’t provide too many examples of where to find Indians like me, so I scrambled for sloppy frames of reference that would make some kind of sense to a group of fellow seven-year-olds.

Apu from The Simpsons didn’t land well: most of us hadn’t watched the show, and it would be years before any of us understood the racism behind it. Those twins in Harry Potter, I would suggest, but, frankly, most of my classmates hadn’t yet read the series—or paid attention to its minor characters. Princess Jasmine was a compromise, and I offered up her name bashfully, hesitant to allow myself the quiet pride of implicitly comparing myself to a Disney princess.

Still, my classmates would confuse me for the other kind of Indian—an indige nous person, the kind whom our teacher encouraged us to playfully caricature through our Thanksgiving-inspired drawings and fairytale discussions about colonial America.

Whenever we spoke about Native Americans, our class would role-play, imper sonating the colonists of four centuries ago encountering an unfamiliar people. (For those of us who were neither white nor indigenous, it was expected we choose a side.)

When we weren’t simulating these interactions, we would read a textbook that consistently employed the past tense to describe indigenous communities, forgo ing any mention of the brutal genocides of their people, the ceaseless invasions of their lands, the growing militarization of their homes, the trauma that still lingers.

Each year, at the end of our class unit on the Pilgrims and Indians, I would bring home the beaded medicine bags and colorful dreamcatchers we made in class and proudly showcase them on my bookshelf like relics of something I imagined to be

Years later, when my classmates had grown old enough to fathom the difference between American Indians and Indian Americans—our inverted names a vestige of Christopher Columbus’s well-documented folly—no one told us there was a res ervation just miles away from our homes in Tucson: the Tohono O’odham Nation.

The O’odham had been here for millennia, of course, and along with co-opting the tribe’s historical lands, the city of Tucson had conveniently borrowed words from the O’odham language to describe its own, urban landmarks: the Tohono Tadai bus station downtown, the Tohono Chul botanical gardens up north near my house.

In the O’odham language, Tohono means desert, and grafted onto this arid, unfor giving landscape is a city of half a million residents, many blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the stolen land upon which they exist. I was one of them.

Reduced to a footnote of history in this desert are the tribe’s complicated past and its contemporary challenges: the loss of tribal sovereignty, increasing governmental occupation, missing and murdered indigenous women.

Tucson is a city that has allowed itself to forget. …

Looking up at the menu sprawled across five TV screens, I am unsure of exactly what frybread is and whether or not to order it, so I Google the word on my phone when I am standing in line and learn that it originated from the U.S. government’s attempted ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people, known as the Long Walk.

We place our orders and wait for the three O’odham women and tribal school counselor who have agreed to meet us here.

As we wait, I become painfully aware of who we are: just another group of non-in digenous people on indigenous land. We have told ourselves we are here to learn, much like those who have come before us. I quietly fear how we will appear to the O’odham women as our collective ignorance is slowly laid bare, as our persistent questions about life on the reservation gradually expose the assumptions we do not yet know we harbor.

We will ask them about life on the reservation as if it is something that can be packaged into neat sentences. We will expect them to feed us the stories of their

Confession: I have come to detest the word “ally” because it represents a kind of loophole: the ability to adopt a struggle without actually experiencing it, the privi lege to partake in a naïve brand of activism without enduring any sort of concomitant, existential threat. I hate that it is the best we can be in this situation.

The Kansas City Chiefs pennant hangs above photos of indigenous men and women.

April, Pachynne, and Hon’mana spend three hours talking to us against a backdrop of colorful NFL pennants punctuated with historical photos of indigenous women in regalia.

We start with the usual questions about Trump’s border wall, which would bisect tribal lands, choking off sacred burial grounds and water sources straddling the border. We yearn to know of the O’odham community’s reactions to the wall—its fears, its ensuing fight.

I imagine these are questions the women have answered countless times before, sitting in this very diner, their answers satisfying the hunger of visiting political

journalists on encroaching deadlines, erudite magazine writers who hit words together like song.

But there are other things I want them to tell me, things that aren’t usually given the space to gestate during fifteen-minute conversations with reporters often centered on a single, premeditated theme. I know these things exist, untold, in the liminal space between our words. But I don’t know what to ask.

As time crawls forward, I watch the barriers separating the four of us and the O’odham women dissolve ever so slightly. It feels natural, as though together, we have cobbled a patchwork of trust appropriate for this conversation to march on— slowly, and increasingly steadily, like a newborn’s heartbeat.

April recalls the lingering trauma of being racially profiled and detained at a Bor der Patrol checkpoint with her children while trying to exit the reservation.

Hon’mana speaks of compromising tribal sovereignty for the sake of a national security mandate, becoming desensitized to the robotic eye of a surveillance tower in her own backyard.

Pachynne remembers the young asylum seeker who showed up at her doorstep, parched, asking for small amounts of food and water to support endless days of trekking through the Sonoran Desert after crossing the border.

The women tell us of the tribal border gate that was welded shut after the Mexican government sold O’odham land to a private citizen who cut off access to sacred indigenous sites south of the border.

They speak of state politicians who have never visited the reservation.

Of presidential candidates who have reduced indigenous identity to a joke.

Of feeling like phantoms in a land that belongs to them. …

It is three o’clock. Everyone is exhausted. We shake hands with the O’odham women, thank them for their time, and climb into the car.

We sit in silence on scorching leather seats, shining tires tracing the skin of the desert beneath us as we drive east, back to Tucson, away from the reservation.

The sun is behind us. In just minutes, the checkpoint will be, too.