A media Good morning podcast fans, and welcome to it could happen here. It's me James today and I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Garrison Davis Haige.
Hello. Hey, So what I don't want to talk about today is a little piece I wrote.
I read it on my patreoon that I want to kind of discuss it, but here read it to you and talk about it about what.
We talk about when we talk about immigration.
So if you recently sent me associated pressed piece on the Dadian gap, and the piece was reflecting on the loss of economic opportunity for the Mbra people who had previously sold, as you heard in my series right products services accommodation to migrants coming through a Garian gap. But if you read that whole piece, you'd never know they were Mburra because the word Mbra doesn't occur once in the piece, right, You'd never know that the Mbra people existed.
They never appear in the story. Instead, He which is currently going toe to toe with the Trump administration on whether it should call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America or not, and was ejected from the White House press pool at one point for refusing to call it the Gulf of America used to phrase Comarca Indigenous Lands in its reporting, which I don't know where this
came from. It has kind of a strange capitalization. If you were just reading the piece, you might think that that was the name of the comarca, like that it was a proper noun, but it's not. The commarker is like I guess you could you could roughlyquate that to an American state. It's like an administrative division of Panama. The name of the comarca is Embera un Nan, but that doesn't appear anywhere in the appiece, and you could to be clear, Like, I understand that some reporters don't
speak Spanish. I understand that some reporters, like you know that they are not like particularly expertly given region. Neither am I that was my first time in Panama. But like, this is something you could find out on Google Maps.
Right. It's not unique to the AP.
It happens all the time, right, and I want to talk about that today because it happens at the US is Sudden Border too. One of the reasons that I wanted to go to the Dadian was because I felt like the Embiras story was not being told when people
talked about the Dadian Gap. When they're mentioned at all, it's kind of in passing or not as people who have agency, right, And even I think these stories about like the lack of income that they have off to migrants leaving kind of strip them in of agency in the way that they're told. When people talk about the Darien Gap in media, they kind of use this heart
of Darkness construction. Obviously it's Joseph Comrade novel, but like this idea that like it's where the wild things are, I don't know, like it strikes me as very almost orientalist.
Yeah, orientalist is what I was going to say.
Yeah, And it's like it completely discounts that there are thousands of people who live there, who've raised their families there, Their children play fucking basketball there, right, they spend their whole life there, and they bury their elders there and they have done for thousands of years.
For them, it's their home, right.
And I understand that the jungle could be scary, and I think anyone who's listened to my series will will understand that, Like the Jungle was scary for me sometimes, and it can be a very harsh environment. But if you're someone who belongs there, if you're comfortable there, it can also be home, and it could be beautiful and it could be bountiful. And I think the same thing is true of the mountains and deserts and rivers that
make up the USA southern border. The desert can kill people, I'm well aware of that, But for the people who call it home, the desert is somewhere that contains their memories and their sacred spaces, their childhood recollections, and the remains of their ancestors.
Right.
And the emission of indigenous perspective is something that we saw again when Christian Home decided to wave a number of laws in order to facilitate after construction of.
The border wall.
So I want tod again the AP coverage there the AP, and again they're far from unique in this, right, Lots of other outlets did this too. They seem to have only engaged with the DHS press release as opposed to the actual proclamation by knowing which you can find in the federal register. Right, So the press release only focused on the environmental laws she was waving. DHS said, and
I quote to cut through bureaucratic delays. DHS is waving environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, that could store vital products for months or even years. This waver clears the path for the rapid deployment of physical barriers where they're needed most, reinforcing our commitment to national security and the rule of law. The rule of law think kind of made me laugh as they were like, here
we are waving like a dozen or so laws. But I'm not a big rule of law person, so I guess,
like that's fine. It seems that almost every outlet though, like that's what they read and that's what they ran with, like that they're waving these environmental laws, and I think that can sometimes be this like we still see this all the time in the legacy press, Like when they talk about environmental laws, there's this idea that it's like some kind of like people who want to protect the flowers and the plants and like that it's not that serious,
you know, and that like these environmental laws is something
that's not that are nice but not necessary. Yeah, and like some of these environmental laws, like specifically the ones that regulate water, will determine the future of places like California, like and obviously places south of the border, right, the water doesn't know where the border is, and like in the previous Trump administration, they wave some environmental laws, including ones about flood water, which that combined with the expedited way which they built the border wall, I guess, led
to them not putting floodgates in part of the wall, which then led to the wall damming up with like dead trees and dead cacti right when it rained heavily, and then the wall becoming a barrier to water, and then the wall getting broken or washed away, right because it didn't have like sluice gates so they could.
Open to let the water out.
The ap went to someone called Earth Justice for comment, and to their credit, that person said, quote, waving environmental, cultural preservation and good governance laws that protect clean air, clean water, say god, precious cultural resources and preserve vibrant ecosystems of biodiversity, will only cause further harm to our
border communities and ecosystems. That person is the only person who mentioned the cultural damage is being done here unless a reader themselves that the Federal Register isn't linked in any of these pieces, right, it really is I try and link to it when we talk about something in executive disorder. But unless you've found that yourself, you wouldn't
know that. Along with waving these environmental laws, and like I've said, those are important, they also wave something called the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, according to the Department of the Interior. I was kind of surprised this was still up on their website. Actually, I thought this might have been purred, so like a lot of maybe it just.
Maybe it's just like screwed by.
Yeah, yeah, like well, I mean no, apparently no one fucking talks about it, so yeah, maybe they got away with it, you know, Like it's always funny going on government websites now and being like, oh it's gone, like finding dead links to so much, even in stories I've written in like twenty twenty, those links are dead now.
Nagpur requires any federally funded entity to return human remains, sunery, possessions, objects of cultural patrimony, and sacred objects to the deceased persons and their descendants by and I'm quoting from a website now consulting with lineal descendants, Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations, or Native American human remains and other cultural items, protecting and planning for Native American human remains and other cultural items that may be removed from federal or tribal lands,
Identifying and reporting all Native American human remains and other cultural items in inventories and summaries of holdings or collections, and giving prior notice to repatriating or transferring human remains and other cultural items. So the waiver allows them not to do these things. Right, crucially, in the context of border wall construction, what allows them to do is not to conduct an archaeological survey before they dig the border wall.
And again, like, I don't know why this isn't something the legacy media isn't concerned about. It wasn't in twenty twenty either. Right when they started doing this, they were blasting areas where something called midden soil was found. Mid and soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains. Right, I wrote a piece in twenty twenty for Sierra about this. Normally, before these digs, there would be an archaeological survey done by a tribal representative would be there to take part
in that. Right, that would take time and it would delay construction. Instead, right now, the construction will continue without considering it down. It's done to the cultural patrimony and ancestral remains of the Kumii people here in San Diego, whose homelands spanned both sides of the border, and who were here long before the US or Mexico was talking of. I can't think of a good fucking ad pivot.
Yeah, there really is no good activot for.
Stuff like this. No, there's not. We're just going to do adverts now and we are back. The Cumi not the.
Only indigenous people whose homelands have been significantly permanently damaged by the.
Construction of border barriers.
Right further east, in the homelands of the torn people, where I spent a lot of time, wall construction has destroyed sacred Sguardo's Sguardo's. That's the big cactus, Like when you think of a cactus, right, like the cactus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With the two arms.
You could put a little hat on the actus if you wanted to, maybe give it like a little six shooter and it would look like it was a cowboy. Yeah, it's the it's literally the cactus. It's in all the Western films that were filmed out at Old Tucson there. Yeah, we used to ride our bikes from the passcalt Yaki Reds to the place where they filmed all those Western films. That that was our loop. A very very weird experience
that place. It's like a one day I will write my fucking five part documentary about the myth of the Old West.
But you can find it. You can find it there in Tucson.
The so what was people that aren't aware or afforded the highest respect as ancestors by out on people, and they play an important role in ceremonial and culinary traditions that have been kept alive despite centuries of genocide and similationist policies from state and local government. Under the Biden administration, the Government Accountability Office wrote a report about damage done by border wall construction. Again for now, this is on the internet, and I will link it in the show notes.
I don't know how long that will remain on the internet. It's a pdf, so like it's going to be out and about that it can't be taken down, but maybe it won't be on government websites. They highlighted the case of Monument Hill, which was damaged by explosives in the previous tramp administration, despite being a sacred place for Odham and the site of ceremonies conducted by the here said Odham,
who are their ancestors. Kito Bakito Springs, which is a sacred site and oasis in the Sonoran Desert and it's a really special place, was irreparably damaged in the last Trump administration, including the destruction of a burial site that the Tripe had sought to protect. In some cases, the Biden administration made this worse. One of those was that on entering office, Biden said they were going to build not one more foot of border wall.
In twenty twenty one. Right, he was full of shit.
They built lots more border wall, but they did put a pause on some of the contracts, right. It sort of they finished some of them, and they were like, oh, we can't go back on this federal funding, which has not been an issue for Donald Trump. Four years later they were in Congress approved it, so we have to pay it, which was great. But the bits that they were able to cut included a program that had people taking care of so that they attempted to transplant the saguaros.
They didn't just cut down because they were sacred, right and they're very old. They wanted to take them somewhere else, and this was part of sort of the agreement that they came to. Unfortunately, the Biden administration cut the funding for the people who were taking care of them in their new location, so nearly all of them died. They were being watered and stuff to get them settled into
their new route structure. And because the bid administration cutback funding, it' stopped them from being watered, and so many of them died in areas where barriers were built, but drainage colverts were not finished. The coverts were never install So that
was the flooding I was talking about earlier. Right, Sometimes they just went ahead and built war that when they build the wall, it comes in about fifty foot sections, and they truck those out there and like just put them on the ground flat and pull them up right, and they dig a foundation. They mix the sand, make
concrete and put the wall sections up. But then they I guess it's my understanding that in the end of the last Trump administration, Trump made a claim in a debate about the number of miles of wall that had been built, and that claim was largely inaccurate, but they sort of started trying to expost factor justify it by claiming repairs were miles of war right, And in the final months of the Trump administration, maybe like from late summer to January it was certainly to November, they would
really speed running wall construction, and part of that was putting sections up where there should have been culverts and just putting regular wall sections there and then attempting to come back later and do the culverts, which because of the funding pause, that didn't do.
So then we've seen a shoe.
Woud change in how the desert drains, right, because it backs up at the or the detritus or the dead branches and stuff get caught in the wall, and then the water gets sort of pushed along the wall until it finds a weak point to undermine it, I'll.
Push it over.
Very little of this gets reported at all, Right, Occasionally there are media moments when everyone wants to report on the borders damage to indigenous communities, and we had one in twenty twenty when they started destroying seguadas at the
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. But these appear to be when they just pop up like this, it seems like it's without context or precedent, right, And when outlets ignore Indigenous people for ninety percent of their border reporting, it doesn't give the context it's necessary to explain these incidents, which are outrageous in decades of policy which has been outrageous.
If our listeners are not aware that the border is on Native land, all of it, just like all of America, right, it can seem confusing for them, right when they see something like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and they think, well, that's not on a reservation, because a lot of outlets don't give that context. Right that Obviously, reservations not contain all spaces that are sacred to Indigenous people, and like a reservation is a legal on not a cultural construct,
it can seem alien to them. And lots of these spaces that are being military that will be militarized under it's Roosevelt Reservation declaration that the reservations are not militarized under that, but spaces that are sacred to people still will be. But because are reporting so oft to lacks
that context, people don't understand it. The admission of tribal lands was again like missing in lots of pieces on the Roosevelt Reservation right at Washington Post artic on the ruds of reservation, the one that broke the story.
It doesn't contain the word tribal.
Lands at all, right, It doesn't mention the fact that these areas are not part of the militarization proclamation. The problem here isn't just the ongoing a ragia indigenous people.
It's a failure in basic journalistic practice.
In my mind, right, we can't properly understand borders unless we acknowledge the people they impact. There's no way I could have experienced a dairy and gap in the way that I did if it wasn't for the Mbire people who literally let me live in their homes. Right Without the same generosity that they showed to me, the people
crossing were die in much greater numbers. And it's precisely because migrants arrive in indigenous villages and not in like a government Panama, that a system exists where they're ferried up river on those pitagwars that I reporse it on, right, And it's precisely because they enter government custody at Las blancas a place at the ap called of Riverport by the way, which I mean, it's one of the more
miserable places that one can end up. It's terrible, and calling it a river board fundamentally under cells how appalling, and it's what happens to people. People are stalled there for months, right, and that is because they are entering the system of bureaucracy, the system of the state, the system of fees and identification papers and all these things.
More importantly, I think we can't understand the relatively new and invasive nature of borders, especially borders with physical barriers, without acknowledging the much much longer history of indigenous people moving freely through these areas. Like I said, it's not just people, it's water and wildlife. And in all cases
the damage down will be unforeseen and likely irreparable. But if we only treat the border of the rhetorical thing like something to discuss in Congress, not a physical place, then we miss what's really happening, and we miss the people it really impacts. I don't want to pick solely on that ape, it's a tendency in the whole US right where the overwhelming media narrative eraises the existence of indigenous people unless it's some kind of novelty or trope
through which they can be deployed. The direct example was a particularly stark one to me to spend these amount of time there, and I obviously have a great deal of affection for the people who looked after me. But as more and more laws are waived, both in terms of border wall construction and human rights, more damage will be done. It's already the case that people who speak indigenous languages tend to have much worse outcomes in the
US immigration system, right. I've seen this first hand, Like it could be very difficult when someone arrives and they speak, you know, an indigenous language from Mexico, from Peru, from these places where like the people speak these digitus languages their first language, and it's hard for them to very hard for them to get legal representation, right.
Even US citizens. Like that incident from just a few weeks ago, that nineteen year old was born in the state of Georgia but primarily spoken Indigenous language was like put into ice attention overnight.
Yeah, like which I think kind of these two narratives sort of play into each other, right, Like because indigenous people don't exist so much in so much coverage, it can be much easier for the state to make them disappear, right like like that guy.
Well yeah, and literally being arrested in charge with like like entry as an unauthorized alien.
Yeah, like absolutely, and it's happened to indigenous people who are like indigenous to the United States, right like yeah, and it will continue to I think I've heard some stuff about happening on a Navajorez relatively recently. Obviously, I should say if that has happened to you, as someone you know, you can reach out to us at cool Zone, tips at proton dot me and like, I know that there are lots of big border reporters, that big outlets
who fucking hate me, and I really don't care. I just want to Like, any one person coming into this country who needs a bottle of water is more important to me than all of their collective opinions, right, Like my job, it's not to make them happy. A job is to tell the stories of the people who come into this country and often suffer greatly to do so.
I care more about them than like my ability to be objective, which you know, I don't think we should be objective in these situations, and like, I want to kind of end on this idea of objectivity, because objectivity I don't know. I'm glad that the Washington Post is writing a story about Venezuelan teacher who got deported today. I'm glad that they're giving these people human faces now.
But it's fucking hard to look at the reporters who wouldn't drive half an hour down a dirt road to come and see people in concentration camps when Biden was president, because I don't know, they were worried about getting their rental car dirty, or they don't speak Spanish, or the desert's cold at night. Like I don't know why people didn't come. I suspect it's because their commitment to writing about migrants is more a commitment to doing it when it makes money than it is to doing it because
it's the right thing to do. Like when we write these stories now about deportations being terrible, they seem to pop up without context, right, and the context of how these people came into this country and the amount that they were forced to suffer by choice by the Biden administration.
In twenty twenty three, it's completely absent from these stories. Right, Like the reason folks, some folks that are choosing to leave, is because what they've seen of the US government a week in an outdoor detention camp where the government didn't even bring them food or water, right, and then their passage through this system which doesn't give them a pathway to permanent residency, which doesn't give them a pathway to citizenship,
and then they see these deportations. Like from the migrant perspective, this is just a sort of steady escalation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that what's happening now is the same as what happened before. It's worse, it's considerably worse,
and it's abhorrent. But like that doesn't mean that we shouldn't tell the truth about what happened before either, And it doesn't mean that we should ignore the physical border as well as the sort of rhetorical and internal and technical border, right, all these things that we're seeing now.
And like, the way that borders have worked in this country is that it's like a ratchet that only moves to the right, and the Republicans move it to the right, and the Democrats never move it back, and until we hold them accountable for this, it will continue to get worse. Like the Democrats completely ceded the narrative on migration under the Biden administration, and that's part of why they lost right.
Rather than like making an argument that these people have a right to come here, that many of them are a massive benefit to our society, and it doesn't matter whether they are or not, they still deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and even if you're a big law in order person, like according to international and United States law.
They didn't do that.
They didn't treat them according to international life to States law, nor did they make an argument that it's morally right to do so, and that's one.
Of the reasons they lost right.
This is why I really think that we need to be conscious in our media consumption and be conscious as journalists of like why we do this, because I'm finding it really hard to see this outpouring of care from people who I know didn't care when they were shivering little babies in the desert, from people who could have said something, could have done something right, like this could have stopped earlier if there were big major legacy media op ed, if the pictures of shivering babies were like
on the nine o'clock news, right coming into people's houses every night. This wouldn't have lasted for as long as it did. People wouldn't have suffered. That people wouldn't have died. But because I guess Joe Biden was in ourfice, it didn't matter. And I'm glad that people care now, don't get me wrong, but like I want, especially listeners to think about holding those people accountable to caring when it's not profitable, caring when it's not convenient, and our listeners have to be fair.
Right.
We raised almost fifty thousand dollars for migrants in the desert and that was fantastic.
But yeah, I still think.
We do immigration reporting wrong. I still think from most outlet that's because they treat migrants as a rhetorical device, not as people in the same way that they are. And that upsets me and I wanted to write about it, so I have. I guess that's all I've got. It's not the best ending. If you are somebody who wants to get in touch, right, like I said, especially with regard to immigration activities on reservations or indigenous people, you can reach us at cool Zone tips at proton dot me.
If there's other stuff do you want to share with us, you can do it there too. It is end to end ENCRYPTID only if you send from another proton email address, and that's all I got.
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcas You can now find sources for it could Happen Here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.