American Indian Law Alliance
DACA: Human
Rights Cannot Be Deferred
Betty
Lyons
March
3, 2018
For those who know the Americas as the Great
Turtle Island - Abya Yala, DACA is not an immigration crisis – it is a matter
of simple human rights
As
we approach the March 5th date for expiration of the legal immigration
status of so-called DREAMERS – those
who came to the US as children and now fall under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, or DACA – we as citizens of the original Indigenous Nations of this continent
have been watching closely.
We
have dealt with these issues ever since the first Europeans crossed the
Atlantic and claimed the right of “discovery” over lands to be called the
Americas, a continent known to us for millennia as the Great Turtle Island - Abya Yala. Since the founding of the United
States on our lands in 1776, these policies and practices have had a
devastating impact on the territories and Human
Rights of our Original Nations
and our relatives from both north and the south of the US borders.
For
us, DACA is not an immigration crisis. It is a human rights crisis. And human
rights cannot be deferred. Every day approximately 122 people lose DACA
protection. This cruel policy immorally punishes and traumatizes innocent young
people and their families.
As Indigenous Peoples, we know our history
and we know our relatives. Many
so-called “undocumented” people are in fact Indigenous Peoples, children of
Original Nations with a millennial history of travel across the continent to
trade and engage in cultural and ceremonial obligations at sacred sites of
their traditional territories long before the US (and its international
borders) even existed.
The
US-Mexico border is not an indigenous border. Similarly, to citizens of the Onondaga Nation – part of the Six Nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy,
whom the European Americans call the Iroquois – the US-Canadian border runs
through our traditional lands that we view as one inseparable nation.
O'otham Nations
Sin Fronteras
[Arizona-Sonora]
Dividing
families is something we cannot imagine doing to others, because we have been
through this pain many times at the hands of the same government. That is why
we as Indigenous Peoples support immediate passage of a “clean” Dream Act, and it should definitely not
be linked to funding a wall along the US-Mexico border that Indigenous Nations
never consented to in the first place. A border wall will exacerbate human
rights violations and bring horrendous environmental destruction to the land.
There
is a twisted irony at play here. As original Nations our ties to the land
emerge from time immemorial. Today however we are forced to call for justice
from the international arena in order to restore our rightful stewardship over
our territories.
In
2014 the Onondaga Nation filed a land rights action against the US government
with the Organization of American States
(OAS) for the illegal taking of our lands. We had taken our case all the way to
the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear our case in part because "it
would be too disruptive to the full use and enjoyment of the non-Native people
who now live on our lands."
While
the US constitution says that treaties – such as the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua with the Haudenosaunee, signed by George
Washington for the United States – are the supreme law of the land, the
United States has failed to enforce the promised recognition and protection of
our lands from illegal invasion by settlers. As we have sought justice in the
US courts for this illegal theft of our land, the courts refused to hear the
case, citing the Doctrine of Discovery
and claiming “it would be too disruptive” to the “justified expectations” of
non-native people now living on our lands.
To
be clear, the Onondaga Nation explicitly stated we do not want to “deport”
people from our lands, the way we have been displaced historically. Yet while
the US claimed it feared disrupting our non-native neighbors, they would
hypocritically deport young Dreamers who have grown up in the US, with no
regard for disrupting their lives and families.
We
have had to face the fact that our legal case has no further recourse in the
U.S. court system. The "American Dream" of justice for all
is simply not true, and for the Indigenous Peoples, it never has been.
If
we are to truly discuss US immigration, we should start in 1493 with the “Doctrine of Discovery”, a series of Papal Bulls declaring lands not
occupied by Christians could be claimed in the name of the explorers’ European
sovereigns. Far from ancient history, the doctrine to this day underlies the law and policy related to
Indigenous land rights and human rights in US courts and across the continent.
The lingering racism underpinned by the doctrine is the real “constitutional crisis” unfolding before
us daily, a symptom of the underlying crisis of self-definition of the US body
politic that lies at the root of the tree of the American “experiment” in
democracy.
“Indigenous peoples, in particular those divided by
international borders, have the right to maintain and develop contacts,
relations and cooperation, including activities for spiritual, cultural,
political, economic and social purposes, with their own members as well as
other peoples across borders.”
In
the spirit of responsibility for caretaking the land for future generations, we
call upon leadership from all sectors of society to live up to the ideals of
democracy and decency, of human rights and justice and act immediately to
protect the DREAMERS and their families, and to recognize, respect and
guarantee the basic dignity and inherent
human rights of all peoples,
including Indigenous Peoples’ equal right of self-determination.
The
time has come for our brothers and sisters of the United States to finally and
for the first time discover the basic law
of respect for our shared and common humanity which binds us all together
as equal relatives of the Human Family.
The time has come to supersede the racism of the Doctrine of Discovery.
No
one is illegal. Human rights cannot be deferred.
Betty Lyons, a citizen of the Onondaga
Nation, is president of the American Indian Law Alliance
###
This preliminary study establishes
that the Doctrine of Discovery has been institutionalized in law and policy, on
national and international levels, and lies at the root of the violations of
indigenous peoples’ human rights, both individual and collective. This has
resulted in State claims to and the mass appropriation of the lands,
territories and resources of indigenous peoples. Both the Doctrine of Discovery
and a holistic structure that we term the Framework of Dominance have resulted
in centuries of virtually unlimited resource extraction from the traditional
territories of indigenous peoples. This, in turn, has resulted in the
dispossession and impoverishment of indigenous peoples, and the host of problems
that they face today on a daily basis.
###
ABYA YALA
September 16, 2017
