Laiken Jordahl

There has to be an overall cultural shift about how we see the border and not see this as a problem or a crisis or an issue that must be fixed. But a place that needs to be protected, as a place that needs to be celebrated ,as a place that actually provides a framework for all of us as we look forward.

Eleanor Paynter 

Welcome to Migrations: A world on the move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate in Migrations, and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. And welcome to the final episode of our first season. We’ve really enjoyed sharing these conversations with you and look forward to sharing Season Two later this year.

In this episode, we focus on migration and dispossession. In simple terms, dispossession is the act of depriving someone of land or property. It's both a local and a global issue, one that spans history and physical space. In this episode, we consider dispossession in several ways: as a physical act of displacement, as the deprivation of legal rights and recognition, as the erasure of history, as the prohibition of freedom of movement, as limits on self-determination, and as the destruction of local ecologies.

And as we untangle some of the connections between migration and dispossession, we begin by acknowledging that we produce this podcast at Cornell University, which is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ, the Cayuga nation. The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ people past and present to these lands and waters. This land acknowledgement was reviewed and approved by the traditional Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ leadership. We read a version of it at the end of every episode, but in this one, we want to open our conversations by intentionally addressing questions of occupation and dispossession in our immediate surroundings. And as your podcast host, I'm speaking from the position of a U.S. citizen and white settler, and someone committed to continuing to learn, advocate and act with these realities in mind.

Although my conversations for this episode will focus on the U.S. context, multiple recent stories have highlighted dispossession as a very present issue globally. We recorded today's conversations a few weeks before the attacks in Sheikh Jarrah and the escalation of violence in Palestine, violence that has turned global attention to dispossession as a present-day concern and as an urgent question. And news that has just come to light in Canada, the bodies of 215 indigenous children have been found buried on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia. And these moments ask us again and again to re-engage with history and its shaping of the present.

In this episode, we hear from two guests, Dr. Kurt Jordan, Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program here at Cornell, and Laiken Jordahl, a Borderlands campaigner based in Tucson, Arizona, with the Center for Biological Diversity. Both are doing work that makes visible how governments and institutions are tied to historical and ongoing acts of dispossession. Our conversations take up dispossession through questions of displacement, memory, borders, sovereignty and rights.

Kurt Jordan 

You know, I think that one of the things about dispossession is that it can happen even when on the surface, it seems like it's not happening, I think.

Eleanor Paynter 

That's Dr. Kurt Jordan. Dr. Jordan is an archaeologist by training studying the culture and history of the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous people in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, working to fill in some of the history that hasn't been recorded, or that was long misrepresented by settlers. Here settlers meaning non-indigenous people who colonized or whose ancestors colonized a particular area.

Dr. Jordan is also part of a team that has traced how the land grant system that enabled the founding of universities—including Cornell—dispossessed indigenous communities of their land.

Kurt Jordan 

There was an article that came out in High Country news last March that sort of identified the entanglement between land grant universities like Cornell and indigenous dispossession across the across the continent.

I think at this point, we've identified ties between Cornell and 15 different states through the Morrill Act process, in addition to sort of, obviously, our entanglement with indigenous groups in New York State, and I think the total number of affected nations were actually up over 200 right now. So it's a very complicated history. So since that article came out, and Cornell had a very prominent place in it, we've been trying to understand that history, connect the dots between what was going on historically, and those communities—where those communities are located in the present, which is not a particularly straightforward matter.

Eleanor Paynter 

Thanks. And yeah, let's do come back to the question of the Cornell Indigenous Dispossession project. Also, because I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit more about how we should be thinking or can be thinking about the broader relevance of some of the histories that you study for folks today. So I guess I would just start us off, I would ask, how do you define dispossession in the context of your work?

Kurt Jordan

So certainly, I you know, in some ways, it's kind of a common sense way of thinking about it, where it's really sort of movement into the territory of another group with the intention of taking over, right, so this is, you know, colonialism, and where the entering population really sort of bars access to previously accessible spaces and resources for the original group.

Some forms of dispossession can look legal. You know, so if we think about things like treaties, right, that those are something that are supposed to be very honored, voluntary parts of international diplomacy, but when indigenous nations in North America were engaged in treaty-making with the United States, or sometimes the individual states within it, they really were disadvantaged. There was pretty much I think none of those treaties native people would have consented to voluntarily that there was always an element of force, in many of them, that the amount of pressure that was put on Native people was pretty overwhelming. So even though sometimes it looks equitable, or “legal,” you know, I think that we have to take into the account, the ability of sort of dominant powers to write the laws for their own benefit, right? So that the same way that let's say, a legislator might be able to, you know, pad up a vote for a bill that gave him a pay raise, or let's say, a President might be able to pardon some of his associates or something like that. There are things that are legal that are not necessarily moral, ethical or fair.

Eleanor Paynter 

So maybe a very straightforward portrayal of the relationship between migration and dispossession is that dispossession involves displacement in some way. And I'm interested in hearing a little bit about how your work complicates that idea, or tells us a bit of the more complex history of that relationship. Could you say a little bit more, focusing maybe on this area that we're in now, the Cayuga lands in the Finger Lakes region of New York?

Kurt Jordan 

So indigenous peoples, as the original occupants in a particular area, do assert—you know, obviously, they've got an enormous amount of experience, heritage, you know, that their languages, their cultures, their ways of life, their spiritual systems, are all entangled in a particular location. And I think if we look at the local area, let's say, right in Ithaca, we don't really have much Euro-American settlement, where people came in with the attention to stay, until right about 1790. Okay, so it's incredibly late in this region, it's actually after the American Revolution. But if you do the math with the amount of—you know, if you look at the proportions of the total amount of human occupation, sort of European Americans have been the predominant residents for about 1.8% of the total human occupation, and, and therefore 98.2% of the of the human history of this region, was when the indigenous population was predominant.

So another thing, I guess that we might sort of complicate that is that there were, at least if we talk about the dispossession locally, that it was pretty extended and fairly complicated. A lot of people think about the American Sullivan-Clinton expedition, which was something that George Washington, as the commander of the US Army, ordered into Seneca and Cayuga territory in 1779. And there was widespread destruction as a consequence of that. There was actually—his orders indicate that he was looking for the extermination of local people, that communities regard this as a genocidal intent. And I think that the there's plenty of evidence to support that position.

But there but, you know, many people sort of say, “Okay, well, the Americans, they conquered the region, they—you know, Sullivan-Clinton was the end.” But if you look at the details of the history, you will find that Sullivan-Clinton left pretty much immediately after the episodes of destruction, and they went back down into Pennsylvania. and Haudenosaunee or six nations, Iroquois people came back, including Cayuga who came back to the Cayuga Lake region. And we've got pretty good evidence that there were Cayuga people in right here in the ethnic area until almost 1800. So, and they overlapped with some of the early settlers. And you can see that there's slim evidence, but it's there of trade between indigenous peoples and the first white residents of Ithaca, for things like baskets, or maple syrup or furs or things like that. So there's, it's—you know, it's not simply that there was that that episode of warfare, but you see this sort of complicated, moving back and forth.

And then you then you get some treaties that are negotiated between the Cayugas and others with New York State, which actually have been proven in court to have been illegal by federal law at the time. Although the Supreme Court basically said that, although they were illegal, that the Cayugas weren't entitled to any sort of damages, either in terms of land or in money. So it's been very, it's been very, very complicated. So where the US court system has actually said that these state treaties were not conducted, you know, equitably or within the framework that had been set up by the federal government, but there's been no rep--but they also sort of wash their hands of any sort of responsibility.

Eleanor Paynter 

Can you talk a little bit about how then the representations of these histories have changed or been corrected over time?

Kurt Jordan 

Yeah, I guess one of the one of the things that's very prominent if you read most local histories, especially older sources, but it's still quite prominent in people's minds—and it also is, is present in a very interesting I think and also troubling way on the landscape as well—is that there was a there's been a long standing presupposition among settler residents that there have been a series of population replacements among indigenous people throughout the history of this of this landscape.

And so I think that this is another thing—there political ramifications for that, because it just again, it's sort of like, “Oh, you know, Native people just cycle through here all the time. They never were here for very long, they were pushing each other out and moving in different places.” But I think that that a lot of that does not really hold up particularly well when you look at the detailed evidence.

The real source of that is because the early archaeologist, who speculated about the deep history of what is now Central New York, had no idea about the true time depth of human occupation in this region. The very esteemed New York State archaeologist William Ritchie said that in 1944, he estimated that the total amount of human occupation in this region had been 2000 years. Okay, we now know that it's 13,000 [years] right? Among the Haudenosaunee, there is oral tradition that dates back to the you know, to the, the last ice age. I talked to one of my one of my colleagues who's Seneca, and he was telling me the stories that his grandmother related about the time of the rushing water, which really sounds like it was you know, like when the glacial ice melt lakes you know, that the ice dams broke and the water was just roaring, you know, down to the Atlantic Ocean out of the Great Lakes. The native people, of course, know this, but most settler scholars, I think, tend to read the local histories, you know, that were written in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and everybody's sort of replicating this story.

When I did mention about it being present on the landscape, a lot of this has to do with, you know, the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. One of the ways that they put scholars to work was to do a series of road signs across the state, with markers about important things that happened in local history. And so those are those blue and yellow markers that if you drive around through New York State, if you look at the dates that most of those were put up, a lot of them are 1932, 1933. And what that meant was, a lot of the archaeological wisdom of that time has been put on signs, and it's still there. And that's what--and people look at that. And they're like, “Oh, that must be right.” So, you know, if you're a local resident, you may drive past those and read those things every day. And, and people very rarely think about, you know, the possibility that some of this information is totally outdated and wrong. It may suggest that you know, that some of those signs really need to be revisited and replaced.

Eleanor Paynter 

Could you say a little bit more about the role that oral tradition plays in this?

Kurt Jordan 

Sure, so I think, especially when we're talking locally about Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ or Cayuga Nation people, that this territory, I think, was probably the least described by European sort of visitors, missionaries, etc. And so there's an awful lot of information that just isn't present in the documentary record that historians and scholars usually use. So there's all kinds of—you know, that so much of it has, you know, really happened outside the purview of Europeans all together. So I think I can give you a couple of very good examples of that, which are really, I think, very distressing examples, but they have to do with the Sullivan-Clinton expedition.

The Americans came through and basically came through—the native people essentially headed into the woods right ahead of the American forces. So there wasn't very much battlefield confrontation, very few casualties on the battlefield. But native people, the Cayugas, ran for shelter and stayed out of the way until the Americans had burned all their villages, destroyed their crops, cut down the peach and apple trees, and destroyed all the stored food. And then they marched on to do it to the next settlement, and the native people came back. But so but the Americans didn't see that. They weren't aware of what was going on with the native, with the Cayuga population. And the native people tell the story about hiding in Great Gully, and trying to keep the dogs and the babies that were with them quiet so that the Americans wouldn't figure out where they were. And then, you know, I heard that story. And then I went back and looked in more detail about the Sullivan expedition. And there you can see where they over-- the Americans overnighted right there. And all of a sudden it you know, you can imagine what that night would have been like for the for the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ people that were trapped in Great Gully, and trying to keep quiet so that the Americans wouldn't come after them.

So I think you know, that that's something where it's just it's absent completely in the in the American documents, but the oral tradition does talk about it. You know, so it's, it's, you know, all of these things are, are true, but you're just not going to see them if you use the standard historical sources. But there's still very, very vivid descriptions of what of what these events were like, that are held by Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ people, even though they haven't been in this, you know, living in this region, in many cases for almost 200 years.

Eleanor Paynter 

Thinking especially about how the history that you've just talked about how we might connect to the history that you've just talked about with thinking about the institutional presence of Cornell and what that means for those of us who are here today.

Kurt Jordan 

Yeah, so. So certainly, I think we have to think about the benefit that settlers in Ithaca and settler institutions like Cornell University have from being able to access and develop and use the land and resources here. So clearly, you know, the City of Ithaca, Cornell University, etc, would not exist if we didn't have this territory. So therefore, it's been very much to our advantage to have access to that land and space. And resources and the natural beauty. But also, I think we have to think about what native communities have lost because they've been dispossessed, right? That you can imagine what you know, if they, if they were still here, you know, they would be in a much better place today, in terms of their economies, in terms of their ability to access sacred sites, the graves of the ancestors, etc.

So this is something although it happened, you know, for the most part about 200 years ago, this is something that has ongoing repercussions. And what a lot of scholars in Indigenous Studies have tried to stress is that this is something you know, it's not something, you can just brush it under the rug, that it's finished, and done and historical, that there are continuing repercussions that really the system, the structures of inequality that we have in the United States and Canada today are predicated on this, and their effects are ongoing. Right. Not to mention the fact that many, you know, Native communities are still under tremendous pressure from corporations and governments to get access to resources to build pipelines, you know, to take territory, it's really, it's an ongoing process.

So I think that this is, is something you know, like… sometimes people ask me, they say, you know, “When am I ever going to be able to feel okay, right, you know, as a settler?” And I think that the answer is you're not right, this is something that that you have to have in the back of your mind. It should be uncomfortable to be a settler, right? It's not something that you're that you should be able to wash your hands of, that there's always elements of your wealth, your career, your institutions are built on the fact that native people were disadvantaged, pushed out, killed, marginalized in the past. So we have to think about that, you know, certainly President Pollack at Cornell, has said that we have to think about Cornell's entanglement in systems of inequality, and the fact of indigenous dispossession is an enormous part of the of how the whole American, North American system of inequality is, is set up in the way that it is.

Eleanor Paynter 

And the project, the different pieces that I've seen so far in the project, also show the connections between not just this area, but how the land grant project really involves dispossession across North America. So Cornell's influence also inas you said earlier, in our conversation, I think across 15 different states?

Kurt Jordan 

Yeah, in addition to New York, so I mean, we the most the most tangible parts of it are locally. You know, I think Cornell owns 4% of Tompkins County, for example. So it's a pretty substantial amount of Cayuga or Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ nation territory. But because of the way that the Morrill Act was set up, that the federal government sort of allocated lands that it had recently taken in various forceful, nefarious, you know, fraudulent ways from Native people and gave parcels of land essentially—it's a complicated process—but gave them to those universities. And because New York State was the had the largest population in the 1860s, when this law was passed, Cornell received the most land of any land grant institution, about a million acres. And all--there was no federal land in New York state because the dispossession there had already taken place. It was already more or less complete.

So Cornell was awarded lands in 15 different states. The biggest chunk is in Wisconsin; there was almost 500,000 acres there. And Ezra Cornell directly took control of those lands. A lot of it was in pine lands, and they clear cut it and sold the timber. Eventually they sold the lands, and in some cases, Cornell maintains the mineral rights to some of those parcels.

So you can see I mean, that all of this means it really—if you think about sort of effects on ecosystems, that Cornell's actions really fundamentally changed the ecosystems in Wisconsin, the pinelands have never been the same since and of course, native peoples based their subsistence their cultures, their systems of spirituality, on an ecosystem that that no longer exists, right so Cornell, you know, we can really put that right on the university and its founder, some of those ecological effects.

I think there were about 250,000 acres in California. And as Governor Newsom has, has publicly admitted, there were overtly genocidal policies adopted by the state of California, where people would be awarded cash bounties for bringing in body parts of Native people that prove that they were dead. So, you know, so and that's some of the land that Cornell got.  So that we have that sort of, you know, it's the history is pretty rough. You know, but basically any time Cornell was connected to a piece of territory, you know, our project has asserted that, that you know, Cornell is morally implicated with the dispossession that happened there.

Eleanor Paynter 

Kurt Jordan is also part of an expanding group at Cornell working with the migrations initiative to support research, pedagogy, and community-engaged projects that respond to the intersections of migration, dispossession, and racism. This work is supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation and you can follow it in the coming months at our website and on Twitter @GlobalCornell and with the hashtag #CornellMigrations.

We now move to the US Mexico border to think about dispossession in relation to the construction of the border wall. Turning to my conversation with Laiken Jordahl. Laiken works with the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that promotes the conservation of wildlife and diverse ecologies, and that approaches conservation issues through the understanding that social, economic, and environmental issues are interconnected. He's also an activist and an ally in the southern Borderlands of the US where he documents the devastation caused by border wall construction.

Laiken Jordahl 

Beautiful breezy day out in the Arizona Sonora border. I'm sitting right at the end of the existing border wall. Way back there to the west is Nogales, Arizona, and Sonora. And up over my head is the Patagonian mountains and Coronado National memorial.

Eleanor Paynter 

The voice you're hearing is Laiken’s, taken from a video on his Twitter account. In it, he sits near the edge of a border wall construction site.

Laiken Jordahl 

We've been out here all morning, shooting with a film crew, and we haven't seen a single border patrol agent. Now this area is the end of the existing wall. This is the first gap in the fence. I just think it's critically important to challenge this narrative that there is a crisis at our border. The only crisis is the one made by our own horrific border policies, the ones that promote death, disappearance and environmental destruction as a false solution.

Eleanor Paynter 

In this video, like many others he circulates as part of his Borderlands campaigning, Laiken addresses the border wall as an instrument of dispossession. Despite a wealth of scholarship showing that border walls put migrants in harm, making them take riskier journeys, or preventing them from reaching a safe place to claim protection, we've seen US administrations insist on continuing to police and obstruct our southern border. And as Laiken’s campaigns address, the wall really exemplifies how strategies for controlling or inhibiting people's movements blocking people on the move, also destroy natural and cultural heritage and dispossessed indigenous communities of their land, including in this case, sacred desert sites.

In a 2017 report called “A Wall in the Wild”, the Center for Biological Diversity describes how the construction of a wall along the US Mexico border will destroy wildlife habitats and inhibit the movement of many animals. But the Center also recognizes that these effects are inseparable from the violence the wall represents for people on the move and for local communities. To quote from the report, “the wall will no doubt deepen divisions between the two countries and in combination with increased militarization of the border, lead to untold suffering for those seeking a better life and to harm to the many communities along the border. The wall will also have serious impacts on numerous threatened and endangered species and other wildlife.” Since that 2017 report, as construction continued, we've seen these devastating effects play out. We've also seen numerous examples of resistance to the wall and the violence that inflict on migrants and indigenous communities. As a Borderlands campaigner, Laiken works behind the camera documenting this devastation, and he also stands with protesters as an advocate and ally. Here's our conversation.

Laiken Jordahl 

There're so many different layers of dispossession happening here. Historical dispossession, you know, almost 200 years ago, people came through this land and decided this is where the border would be, and in doing that, they dispossessed indigenous people—the Tohono O'odham–and all of the other indigenous tribes native to these areas of their history, of their autonomy. And starting back then, that essentially is when the violence of dispossession was thrust upon this landscape. And in the centuries and decades since, that has manifested in more physical forms, such as people actually being kicked off the land, kicked out of their homesteads, communities being militarized, and then also lands that are supposed to be protected public lands, losing those protections as a result of the border being imposed, as a result of the government, forcing national security interests onto the land. And all of this, of course, with no approval from the local communities, from native indigenous people who call these lands home. So there're so many different layers of dispossession happening here. And certainly something that needs to be central in these conversations about justice in the Borderlands.

Eleanor Paynter 

And I know that your work is, is looking also at specific sites along the border. I wonder if you could maybe by way of example, talk about a particular site where we see some of these consequences really playing out?

Laiken Jordahl 

Yeah. So, you know, I think I tend to look at areas that I know best, that are closest to my heart ,and Organ Pipe, Cactus National monument is a beautiful wilderness area on the border, managed by the National Park Service. In many ways, that's what kind of got me into this work to start with. I was working with the National Park Service, looking at the biggest threats to that wilderness area to natural and cultural resources in this national monument. And it was so clear, from my time there, that the single biggest threat facing this beautiful landscape and all of the cultural history there, was the threat of border militarization and the threat of border wall construction. Because as soon as the federal government decides that it wants to build a wall, it can just waive all of the laws that protect the landscape, that protect natural and cultural resources. And in doing so, it just wipes this protection off the face of the map.

So, specifically at Organ Pipe, there is this beautiful freshwater spring, just a couple hundred feet north of the border, extremely rare freshwater in the desert. This place is called Quitobaquito springs. Biologically, it's a wonderland. There are two endangered species there that don't exist anywhere else in the country. And it's also one of the longest continually inhabited places in the Sonoran Desert. There are records of human history at Quitobaquito dating back 15,000 years. And in the 1950s, the National Park Service sought to push an indigenous family who was living at the springs, who was tending to a pasture, who had pomegranate trees planted, out because they wanted the springs to fit their vision of a national monument.

They actually constructed a pond, which at the time, I think they thought would look something, you know, pastoral, they thought it would look like a wildlife refuge was supposed to look like. And in doing so they destroyed all of this living history, this ethnography, this richness that now we wish we could get back. So again, there have been so many different layers of of erasure and dispossession on this landscape.

And just this year, the border wall has been built through the springs, across the area just south of the springs, destroying cultural sites, stopping wildlife migration, and again, erasing history, and dispossessing all of us of the connection to this land.

Eleanor Paynter 

And I've followed a lot of this, thanks to your efforts also on sharing this information on social media. And I know that a lot of through a lot of news coverage, too, maybe not enough news coverage, but as you've been able to represent what's going on there to different outlets. And it's I mean, you used the word violence before, and you really see that in some of these photos. I'm remembering a couple of images of the sort of chopping down of these cactuses, I think, that I assume are also unique to that area that are part of the National Monument—like its namesake—that you see just sort of laying there in the wake of this constructions. It's really--to see border wall construction as actually an act of destructions. Pretty astounding.

Laiken Jordahl 

Yeah, astounding is a good way to put it. But, I mean, it was so deeply enraging to return to this place where I used to work where my job there was to try and protect the wilderness. And to see the namesake species, the organ pipe cactus, chopped up and discarded in trash heaps, along the site of border wall construction. I mean, this entire monument was designated to protect the organ pipe cactus, this wild cactus. And these are the species that we're seeing just obliterated to make way for the border wall. Hundreds, if not thousands of them have been completely destroyed, to make way for this wall through a wilderness area, through a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, through areas that are sacred to the Tohono O'odham and other indigenous nations. It is astounding and enraging.

And it's hard to comprehend just how much history is being destroyed when each one of these beautiful cactus specimens is destroyed. One saguaro cactus can live over 200 years. It takes a cactus ten years to reach the size of my fist. I mean, these cactuses grow so incredibly slowly, some of the ones that we've seen bulldozed, just chopped up in pieces, were much likely older than the border itself. So it's hard to comprehend the amount of destruction and erasure happening here.

Eleanor Paynter 

That's a really remarkable way to—well, to place a reminder also that the—of the border as itself a construction. And I think, especially about Quitobaquito Springs as a place where we could, you know, go are an area that we could study as a place where—well, I'm thinking about how in this podcast and the initiative, we're really interested in the intersections of all these different kinds of movements, and really understanding how human movement and human wellbeing is tied to local ecologies, into the movement of plants and animals, to changes, as sensitive to changes in weather and climate. And so what a what a rich environment for studying that. And then given what's happening, what an example of the multiple kinds of consequences that this kind of construction can have, how it affects all kinds of different living beings and their entanglement with each other. But you're also talking about it as something that's not unique to now, that there's also a much longer history of dispossession along the border, and even at this site, that even in the 50s, they were already displacing people to, you said, create the site in the image that they had in mind of what it should be.

And so thinking to the future, also, I wonder if, there's some talk that if the border wall doesn't remain the physical construct, in any case, that will become a kind of high-tech wall. So, with surveillance drones, and towers ,and maybe strategically placed lighting and that kind of thing. Do you have thoughts about that kind of wall or border structure as opposed to the physical wall that we see being put in place now?

Laiken Jordahl 

Yeah, certainly. So I mean, before this current wall, this current iteration of the border—what we call the Trump wall, rips through Organ Pipe, there were are already dozens of high tech surveillance towers, infrared camera technology, all sorts of cameras and sensors deployed throughout the wilderness. I think people don't understand that we already have what folks often describe as a virtual wall, placed all along the border. We already have the largest law enforcement agency in a country with 20,000 agents deployed throughout our communities throughout national monuments and wilderness areas. There is already an army of border patrol agents scattered across the border, with technologies that you wouldn't even believe.

So I think in so many ways, we already have that virtual wall. And to be honest, that, in itself, that technology, that surveillance is extremely damaging to civil rights, to communities, and also to the environment. Because we have to install these structures deep into wilderness areas, we have to drive out and maintain them. And with or without a wall, the operations of border patrol and the Department of Homeland Security, run roughshod over areas protected by laws like the Wilderness Act.

When I worked at Organ Pipe, one of the pieces of information that we were able to uncover is that border patrol vehicles drove 17,000 miles off road in designated wilderness areas in just one year. So that means they're ripping through these areas, destroying archaeological sites, interfering with endangered species like the Sonoran pronghorn. So there's so much environmental degradation happening beyond just border wall construction. And all of that is a threat to the records of cultural history. All of that is destroying the Borderlands as we know them.

Eleanor Paynter 

What examples of resistance or solidarity practices have you participated in, or have maybe been a model for you in working to combat this violence?

Laiken Jordahl 

Yeah, so there's been all sorts of protests, of direct actions, of efforts to meet with congressional representatives. You know, our campaign against the wall has employed all of those tactics. We've lobbied Congress, we've worked with border communities to mount massive protest demonstrations, we've filed more than half a dozen lawsuits against this project. So we've used every tool available to us, at least in terms of traditional organizing.

But I have been so inspired by concerted movement of indigenous activists, mostly led by O’odman women, who have led the direct actions at the border. They've shut down the distribution of materials to get to border wall sites, they've mounted actions up in Phoenix to stop the production of steel. And again, down at Organ Pipe, where they were actually building the wall across Quitobaquito though the sacred spring.

It's so enraging to watch the National Park Service, who I used to work for, be the agency that is actually arresting and incarcerating these indigenous activists. Some of my friends have been thrown in jail by National Park Service police, who took an oath to protect the natural and cultural history of places like Organ Pipe. So to me, I think a lot has to be done. The charges against Nellie and Amber, who were the land defenders arrested at Organ Pipe must be dropped. And I do think that those kinds of direct actions, especially when led by people indigenous to that land, must be listened to.

Eleanor Paynter 

What would you say to people who are really physically removed from that part of the country about, I guess, how to get involved or what can be done, or even how we might understand how these acts of dispossession affect people and communities who are living far from the border itself?

Laiken Jordahl 

I think for starters, people have to understand that the Borderlands is not the place you hear about on the news. So many people I talked to think about the US Mexico border, they describe it back to me as a desolate place with sand dunes and rocks, and not a lot of communities. Not a lot of history. Certainly not a lot of biological diversity. But the reality of the US-Mexico Borderlands is that it is one of the most breathtaking, culturally diverse, exciting places that I've ever lived. That's why I've fallen so deeply in love with it.

And I think we have to reframe how we talk about the border, how we think about the border, and see it as a place worthy of protection, see it as a place of hope, and encounter, and interchange. And I think that, in a way, just the border existing has erased all of that from people's consciousness. And I think it's so important that folks are able to come down to the Borderlands, see these beautiful landscapes, take a step into these incredible border communities that are so often miscast as dangerous places. And nothing could be further from the truth when you actually look at the crime statistics.

But yeah, I think, you know, there has to be an overall cultural shift about how we see the border and not see this as a problem or a crisis or an issue that must be fixed, but a place that needs to be protected, as a place that needs to be celebrated, as a place that actually provides a framework for all of us as we look forward to how to heal and how to live together, how to celebrate cultural diversity in history. And I think that the Borderlands as a region has been so marginalized, so erased so dispossessed, that we have to do a lot of justice work and healing. And I'm hopeful for the future, because I think more and more people are aware now, of all of the injustices that have been inflicted on this region. If there's anything that Trump did effectively, I think it was make the world aware of just how heartless his border policies were, just how destructive his policies were. And I'm hopeful that now we'll have the political will to really make meaningful and lasting change.

Eleanor Paynter 

Really, thank you for that answer, it was a really beautiful answer. And also, I'm happy to hear from you that you have hope. And also, I don't know, this vision,. the idea of reframing the narrative, really, by centering the Borderlands as I mean, I think we also often think about them as only a space of transit or an edge space instead of a space that is its own rich environment, full of life, you said. So I'm wondering how the pandemic has affected your work or how it's affected dynamics in the Borderlands. And I guess I'd be, I'd also be curious to hear you think, into the future a little bit about things that you see on the horizon, possible changes or kinds of work that you're that you're doing now.

Laiken Jordahl 

Yeah, I mean, the movement for justice in the Borderlands and so many other movements were deeply stymied, by the pandemic. We were building momentum, we were starting to mount more and more large scale protest actions in the fall and going into the spring of 2020. And then the pandemic happened.

And one of the most frustrating things about it was that wall construction didn't stop. People from across the country continued to pour into border communities to build the wall, living in encampments that were documented to actually spread Coronavirus into border communities, near tribal nations. So we were all under a stay-at-home order, but the government wouldn't stop wall construction. And I think that recklessness really showed you what their priorities were.

Of course, we also saw that movement for Black lives just completely blossom. and so much of our energy went into that. And I think the intersectionality of that movement, and indigenous solidarity movements against the wall, actually helped support our overall cause. And I think, you know, there's so much achieved last summer and fall in that sense. I mean, there's so many clear connections between all of our work here, and we've known that for a long time.

But I think now, as we're moving forward, you know, we are working on building this coalition, we were working on unifying our asks and our demands. A group of about, I think, like four or five dozen organizations recently submitted a document to the Biden administration, outlining specific areas where we are demanding that the wall come down, areas where the wall is causing imminent harm to the environment, and natural and cultural resources, places like Quitobaquito Springs, where every day if the wall stays up, more and more species will be pushed to extinction. So we're working on that.

And then, you know, my longer term hopes and dreams for the Borderlands are that the Biden administration set aside a significant amount of federal funding to actually restore and repair all of the damages. And that something akin to the Civilian Conservation Corps is enacted that employs youth from border communities, from indigenous tribes, from areas that have been so marginalized and suffered from a lot of underemployment. And that we're actually the ones who get to work, restoring his lands, and obviously, have a key seat at the decision-making table, in terms of which areas to take the wall down, what areas to focus on repairing the damages. And I think, you know, reparations for tribal communities who have had to watch their sacred sites be destroyed for the wall are absolutely in order.

Eleanor Paynter 

I'm glad you brought up the connection with the movement for Black lives. And I, I wonder if also sensing a connection to movements happening in other parts of the world in border spaces, and if there's any kind of network of activists that are thinking across regions, or is that something that is not really happening directly? From your perspective?

Laiken Jordahl 

Yeah, I mean, a lot of our networks are very much connected to movements in southern Mexico. You know, the Mexican border itself has also become a militarized, almost secondary layer to our border here in the US. DHS has dumped billions of dollars into militarizing Mexico's border with Guatemala. So there's a lot of intersectional work going on between our border here and the border to our south. And I think, you know, one of the most encouraging things to me that I've watched blossom in the last few years is solidarity among indigenous activists and indigenous-led movements all across the globe. And I think it's become very clear that if we're going to be successful in stopping border militarization and restoring sovereignty to indigenous nations, we have to tap into that international movement, and uplift all of the struggles happening all across the world. Because essentially, it's all the same struggle, the struggle against erasure, against dispossession, the struggle for autonomy, and self-governance, which, yeah, we all can get behind, I think, on so many different levels.

Eleanor Paynter 

Thanks. That's really powerful. And, well, I'm interested in the relationship between what happens on the academic side and what happens on the ground and in activist spaces. And of course, there are a lot of people who are moving between these spaces. So it's not necessarily a clear divide. But I wondered if you have thoughts about what could or should be happening in classrooms, for example? Or what, what power universities might have to respond to some of what's happening in the Borderlands?

Laiken Jordahl 

That’s a great question that, and I honestly haven't thought much about it. But right off the bat, I think some of the most important questions that we'll all be wrestling with in the coming years is, what does justice look like? What do reparations look like? How could you possibly begin to compensate individuals or a community for these unspeakable harms that have been inflicted on them?

And I certainly think the world of academia should delve into those really complex questions. I know that there have been, you know, a lot of different research projects done and all of that looking at, you know, justice for genocide in Guatemala and so many other places, for the destruction of cultural sites and sacred sites. While we can't place any sort of monetary value on what has been destroyed by the Trump administration, I think we need we need to lean towards… well, look towards academia, in terms of looking at how could you possibly start to repair these damages? And I'd be really curious to hear some answers from academics who have spent a lot more time thinking on those questions than we have here.

So I think, you know, just in every way, the imposition of a border, and then our attempts to secure it and militarize it and enforce it, is just a cycle, a never-ending cycle of dispossession. Because none of the wall construction, none of the militarization is actually trying to fix the problem. It's all about politics. It's all about tough talk. It's all about winning elections. And as long as the Borderlands are continued— well, as long as they're still used as a political football, as long as politicians continue to come down here for photo ops and talk tough on the border, I think this cycle is going to continue.

Eleanor Paynter 

To learn more about the issues and movements we mentioned in this episode, check out our episode page, where we link to information about for example, Quitobaquito springs, and the blog post where Kurt Jordan introduces the Cornell Indigenous Dispossession project. We also recommend episodes from the Red Nation podcast for more on issues of dispossession and decolonization. And we'll return to these issues as part of our second season.

And with that, thanks again, so much for being with us for Season One of the podcast. We'd love to hear from you about what this first season has meant to you. And we're always curious to hear where you're listening from, and when you've shared some of our content with colleagues, students, or friends. We'll be back with our second season later this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for bonus episodes. We'd also like to thank everyone who's made this first season possible, including the Cornell Migrations Initiative and Einaudi center teams, Cornell faculty and staff who have worked behind the scenes, and our guests the season who include Tahseen Shams, Katie Fiorella, Filiz Garip, Ingrid Boas, Camila Hawthorne, Shailja Patel, Monamie Bhadra Haines, Lorenzo Pezzani, Kurt Jordan and Laiken Jordahl. If you missed hearing our conversations with any of these scholars and activists, we hope you'll give them a listen.

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on the Move, a podcast by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a cross-disciplinary multispecies initiative that studies how the movements of people animals, microbes, resources, ideas, and more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu, where you can also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us at @GlobalCornell and with the hashtag #CornellMigrations. This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter, Migrations postdoc at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and produced by Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Cayuga nation, and we recognize Cayuga Nation sovereignty and the indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is “Basically Really” by Steve Fawcett. Migrations: A World on the Move is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.