Jackeline Caal, a 7-year-old Maya Q’eqchi’ girl from Guatemala, died on December 8, 2018, while in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol. Since then, a second Indigenous child, also from Guatemala, died at the border. Felipe Gómez was eight years old.

Opinion | Politics | World

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn: Indigenous people treated like criminals at the border

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Satisfying the fears of ugly Americans

By Professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today

The use of the word “choice” is being used to describe what is going on now at the Mexican border when Indians fleeing the death scenes in their own countries are treated as criminals by the U.S.

We all know it was not a “choice” when a little Indian girl was killed at the border a few days ago as she was taken into “custody” by Trumpian Republican officials, one of hundreds of Indians suffering this same fate. We know the word “choice” is being used for political reasons, to satisfy the unfounded fears of ugly Americans.

This official “choice” policy has been put in place by white men and women who came here to the Americas from elsewhere generations ago and now claim to be in charge of the law. They are intent upon building a wall between Mexico and the U. S. to keep this little girl, whose name was Jakelin Caal Maquin out.

She was seven years old and she was Mayan Indian, perhaps a speaker of the Quiche language, even Spanish, but hardly any English. Her death is a symbol of an ongoing criminal act by today’s American government against defenseless Indian people.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen talked to Fox News about the event saying it was “so sad” and cruel for those parents who “choose” to cross borders illegally, endangering their children. Nielsen uses the word “Choice” to shift the burden of blame to the Indian family, criminalizing the need to survive by desperate Indian parents and children.

Jakelin was at the border because her father and she were fleeing life threatening conditions in their home country, Guatemala. They were trying to make it to safety in our country, now called the U. S. of America.

Those of us who read Indian history know this language of “choice” well. It might be useful for American border officials to know this history, too. I challenge them to read the U. S. Senate Miscellaneous Document No. I, 40th Congress of 1868. Those documents made the matter of “choice” for our Indian fathers, mothers and grandparents of two hundred years ago in this way:

“INDIANS ARE TO GO UPON SAID RESERVATIONS….THEY HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE BUT TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THIS POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT AND EXTERMINATION.” (1868 (2nd session {1319}).

The history which flows from that policy and the criminalizing of a human being’s right to exist in his or own land where indigenous people like the Mayans and the Ocheti and thousands of other tribal people have lived for centuries is at the heart of America’s continuing criminal behavior and immorality.

America’s border policy today is not only a wrong, failed public policy, its history has made America one of the most dangerous nations on the entire globe. Palestinians know this policy in the Middle East as they climb the walls in Israel to pray in their holy places and thousands across the globe know it, too.

In all of the Americas, and for all generations, our own Indigenous parents and grandparents (like the parents of Jakelin) have a history of trying to save ourselves and save our children. The U. S. federal government continues to take it upon itself to manage the desperate lives of Indians, installing more FBI Agents on reserved lands right here in South Dakota than ever before and making it comfortable for federal judges in the cities that surround us to give us “maximum” sentences for any and all wayward behaviors, putting every crime by Indian persons on the front page of local newspapers.

We are displaced, defamed and dehumanized in so many ways until our children are beginning to see themselves in the ugly images of those who do not want us in their presence.