For four hours, Raymond V. Buelna, a cultural leader from the Pascua Yaqui tribe, sat on a metal bench in a concrete detention space on the US-Mexico border, separated from the two people with whom he was performing. an Easter ceremony on tribal land in Arizona and wondering when they would be released.
It was February 2022 and Buelna, a US citizen, was driving two people, both from the related tribal community of the Sovereign Indigenous People of Northwest Mexico, from his home to the reservation in southwest Tucson. They had clearance from US officials to cross the border, but when Buelna asked an agent why they were being held, they asked him to wait for the agent who turned him over.
“They know we’re coming,” said Buelna, who for 20 years has made the trip for a variety of ceremonies. “We did all this work and here we are still sitting.”
Now the Pascua Yaqui Tribe is trying to change that, for them and potentially dozens of other tribes in the United States.
Tribal officials have written regulations to formalize the border crossing process, in collaboration with the US Department of Homeland Security’s recently founded Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council, made up of 15 Indian officials from across the American Union.
Their work could provide a template for dozens of indigenous peoples whose homelands, like the Pascua Yaquis, are bisected by modern-day US borders.
If approved, the regulations could become the first clearly established border crossing procedures in the United States specific to one native tribe that may later be used by others, according to Christina Leza, a professor of anthropology at Colorado University.
The rules will be in effect for five years, to be renewed and amended as necessary, and require local CBP agents and consular personnel to be trained on inheritance. culture, language and traditions of the tribe. It would require a Yaqui interpreter to be available when needed and close coordination with the tribe for speedy border crossings.
“This is something that will help everyone,” said Fred Urbina, attorney general for the Pascua Yaqui. “It will make things more efficient.”
Urbina said the tribe met to discuss the proposal with US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to repeated requests by phone and email for comment on the regulations.
When family members, deer dancers, or musicians living in Sonora, Mexico, make the trip to the United States for ceremonies, tribal recognition celebrations, or family events, the United States government usually issues them a Sonora, Mexico identification card. tribe and a visitor visa or humanitarian parole. Still, they must contend with border agents who they say lack the cultural awareness to process them smoothly.
In the last two years, Buelna said that he has made the round trip about 18 times and that he was detained four of them. He said border agents questioned the people he was transporting, whose first language is Yaqui, without an interpreter, and that they have seized cultural objects such as pig hooves and deer. Agents have touched ceremonial objects, despite the fact that only certain people within the tribe have permission to do so.
Urbina explained that the tribe faced new challenges when Homeland Security was formed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, intensifying border security. It became more notable in 2020, when the United States banned “non-essential” travel between both sides of the border to control the spread of the coronavirus. That ban ended this week, but new restrictions are in place.
As a matter of sovereignty, indigenous peoples should be able to determine the possibility of people crossing the border to preserve the ceremonial life of their communities, Leza believes.
“If the federal government says that our particular priorities, our interests in terms of protecting our borders, come before your interests as a sovereign people, then it is not really a recognition of the sovereignty of those indigenous peoples,” he added.
Tribes along the US-Canada border suffer similar problems.
The Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa Indian Tribe is headquartered in Michigan, but 173 of its more than 49,000 registered members live in Canada. Kimberly Hampton, the tribe’s official secretary and vice chair of the Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council, said her members cross the border to attend Native American powwows, fast and visit traditional healers and family, but border agents have roughly searched the feathers. eagle and other cultural objects they carry.
Hampton wants an agreement that includes tribal border crossing liaisons and tribally developed training for border staff.
Members of the Chippewa Sault Ste. Marie Tribe and the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which also has about 8,000 members in the United States and about 8,000 more in Canada, say they have also been asked at the border to prove they own at least 50% of “ blood of the Indo-American race”. This stems from a requirement under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that Canadian-born “American Indians” cannot be denied entry to the United States if they can prove this, often with a letter from the tribe.
Saint Regis Mohawk Tribal Chief Michel L. Conners wants to eliminate the requirement and push for education of border agents on local and national tribal issues. Writing tribe-specific rules, like the ones the Pascua Yaqui tribe writes, “would give a lot of peace of mind to our entire community,” he said.
As for Buelna, who was waiting in that concrete holding space, he reunited with the other two people only after telling a border agent that he believed they had been passed over after a shift change, he said.
“Why can’t there be a system?” Buelna asked. “Why isn’t there a line for us where we can present the proper paperwork, everything we need, and be on our way?”