Under the leadership of Tribal Chair Juan Mancias, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas (Estok G’na in their language) have for many years been in the vanguard of efforts to fight accelerating oil and gas extraction on tribal lands across Texas, while also carefully seeding their people’s cultural restoration. From hosting language classes and nature walks to reoccupying traditional villages in the shadow of planned sections of U.S.-Mexico border wall, the tribe sometimes feels everywhere at once. As a frequent traveler, Mancias is a big reason for that psychic footprint. Increasingly he has traveled internationally to testify before shareholder committees, bank boards, elected leaders, and people’s movements in the hopes of shutting down liquified natural gas investments and plastics while moving the world toward more renewable and Indigenous-led solutions. His activism, as he told Deceleration a few days ago when we sat together at his home south of San Antonio, is driven by his love of his people’s lands.
While President Trump ramps up deportations, clamps down on diversity and inclusion efforts, and works to make entire classes of people right-less and illegal, relatively little attention has been cast to what the MAGA regime means for Native Americans. Already there have been more than a dozen cases of Diné/Navajo Nation members detained by ICE, including at their homes or workplaces, as Truthout reports. Deeper than that are the administration’s developing legal arguments to undo birthright citizenship, which appear to challenge the citizenship claims of all tribal peoples. The following conversation covers much of this, including the Estok G’na’s efforts to check the expansion of Space X at the tribe’s site of creation: the mouth of the Rio Grande River as it spills into the Gulf of Mexico. (For a deeper dive on SpaceX, we recommend our recent podcast with tribal member and indigenous scholar Christopher Basaldú.)
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Greg Harman/Deceleration: One of the things that I always benefit from coming down and meeting with you is learning more about you and learning more about how the tribe has established itself and has worked from the beginning on the recovery and restoration of language and culture.
Juan Mancias: I was born in a snowstorm in Dimmit, Texas, up in Castro County and just north of Lubbock County. A lot of our people ended up there, because we were actually trying to get closer to the reservations and some of them didn’t quite get into it. So they just stayed there because we were canyon people. That’s why the last name: Cano. We were very attracted to the canyons, and we knew the terrain. My grandfather being born in 1883, he was very aware of the terrains and the trails because he was one of the top trailblazers when he came to cattleing with the longhorns. And so he would go all over, you know, so he knew these places. For me, that’s what I considered home for a long time. I never knew what a big city was. We grew up on the edge of towns all the time. As a matter of fact, there’s a road in Plainview, Texas. It’s named after my grandfather because of the fight that he put in against segregation, where they were trying to segregate the schools, and they wanted to segregate the place where we were. And he refused to do that. So he’s the only one that fought against it. And then, of course, he won.
Integration meant we had to learn this this, the white man’s way. And if you lived in the city, you were actually already trying to [change] your idea of who you were, because of your color.
One thing we can’t change is our color. We can marry into whoever we want, but it doesn’t change our color. What needs to change is our heart.
And that’s one of the the hardest things to do. Because if it touches your heart, maybe your brain can can start realizing that there’s more to the issue than there is. And if you’re not questioning that then you’re just another experimental fool that just likes to be comfortable.
To have a soft heart, to feel for others. I mean, there’s a war on “woke,” right? Which is really a a war on on empathy. You described when we were talking earlier that this is a tool of white supremacist culture, because they’re so threatened by our histories. So we’re gonna stop teaching our histories of directed violence, genocidal violence toward Native people, towards Black people, and so many others, because of that fear.
It’s okay to feel afraid. But to feel the fear constantly every day, it has a tendency to be a weakness. Fear is not a weakness. Fear is a start for courage, but you have to know what courage is. If you’re afraid of what’s happening right now then you’re actually promoting a fear that promotes ignorance. And the enemy here is ignorance. And I said it all through my life to a lot of people, that the enemy is not color. The enemy is not a people, not not a race, not a gender. And these guys have made those things into genders because of the fear mongering that they do. And they’re afraid of this: the guilt. And so the enemy is that ignorance. And if you keep building the ignorance, before you know it, we’re gonna be, you know, totally under control of whoever has who has more fear.
If it’s such a great country, like the administration keeps saying in MAGA (Make America Great Again), I think we have to understand that that there’s nothing to fear. What these rich people fear is losing their comfort. And that’s why they put money into buying out these politicians and buying out the government. The oil and gas people, they’re buying out the government. They’re setting up the laws. I mean, even with the “no protest” law that they did here, they said that nobody could impede the critical infrastructures of oil and and the [border] wall or anything. Nobody could impede those things.
And we have to understand that their ideas of critical infrastructure is different [from ours]. To me and to other Native folks, people that are originally from these lands, our critical infrastructure is the water, the air, the land, and each other, humanity—human rights. They don’t talk about human rights. They don’t even mention it anywhere. They keep it out of the conversation because they absolve themselves from any wrongdoing to human rights.
People don’t really do the research of how this country was founded. It was founded on genocide, and it continues to perpetuate it. And I think that’s important to to understand when we talk about this. The fear mongering is working both ways. To the white folk, it’s fear that they’re gonna lose their their way of life, their comfort. And nobody’s threatening their comfort. These people are coming in and actually helping promote that comfort.
You’re talking about immigrants, working people.
Because they [white people] are immigrants too. They don’t realize that. No. Because they they’re second, third generation. Well, you know, when you look at some of these guys that are making the laws: they’re first generation. They’re first-born here, too. So you have to question their citizenship. If you’re gonna start, you know, talking about birthright.
And what about the fear? For those who are the most vulnerable to some of these policies: the sweeps that are are promised and we’re beginning to see manifest; for those who are being excised from citizenship?
So what did they do in Germany? When Hitler took over? They did the same sweeps to the Jewish people there. And it was outrageous. I mean, they were killed. And I don’t think that any kind of absolution is gonna help them [those engaged in current ethnic cleansing]. Because they forgive themselves for the wrong they do. They’re not Nazis, they say. But what are they then? They’re fascist people who just want to continue to promote their own comfort. They don’t want government involvement, but government’s still involved and destroying livelihoods. Their comfort is being threatened by the same people [immigrants] that are promising a better America.
So they are doing this by going after ecological systems and First Peoples? Would you say that the real threat is what they’re doing to the land?
They’re back again to tribal erasure. That’s what they’re doing talking about the 14th Amendment. The product here is the people themselves: We the People. And they don’t see that. They’re ready to sacrifice ‘We the People’ for the individual rich person.
How would you describe the work of the tribe pre-election, and how might your efforts be changing to respond to what’s happening now?
We [the Tribe] have put on a person that is gonna translate human rights principles into practical Spanish language. Where people in the [Rio Grande] Valley can look at their human rights because nobody can understand it. We want those human rights of the UN to be handed to the people that are coming into this country. This country ain’t gonna do it in Spanish. They’re gonna do it in English because they think English is the national language. Well, English is a foreign language to this land. And so is Spanish. But the thing is, the people who are coming in are not just the Mexican people. They’re people from Chile. And they’re people from Uruguay and then other other places that speak Spanish. And so one of the things that we have to understand is that we’ve got to quit throwing everything in a big pot. And that’s what they called the stew pot [ie. America as the melting pot] for a long time. Cook it and make it generic. And and I refuse to live in the United States of Generica. They have no concept or connection to why we have a love and a need for the land and how the land also identifies us [as Native peoples].
I think the closest that comes to it is if you see that Sheridan Taylor show, 1923. In the last part of it the young girl escapes from the school and is wanted for killing a nun. And while she’s killing a nun, she says to her, “I speak to you in the language of the land. And because I speak in that language, I am the land.” That’s the important part.
This land does not understand English. This land does not understand Spanish. That’s why they’re so disconnected from the ecology. That’s why they they don’t see the importance of the ocelot and the damage that they do and what that means to us.
They don’t see what it does to that land that they tore down to build LNG in Garcia Pasture. They don’t understand that. They don’t have that connection. That connection is what’s important because that’s making us part of that Creation, whether you believe in a creator or not. We think that the more Cane’s and the more Bush’s and the more Kentucky Fried Chickens we have—and McDonald’s—that we’re being successful. That the place is growing. No. We’re actually destroying and killing again by not checking where we’re putting these buildings up. Are those burial sites? Those are sacred sites of our people. They were there for a reason. And they’ve taken that reason out.
So recovery of language was an early tribal decision, to ensure that rootedness, that cosmology, was secure and begin that work of repair for the tribe. But y’all have also stepped into many fights against extractive industries: over pipelines, SpaceX, and across traditional lands.
Now you’ve got fools out there wanting to go to other planets and do the same. They say it very loudly.
Let me just say it again because what’s happening here is that when you don’t make the connection [with the land], you wanna go to another planet; you wear a T-shirt that says ‘Occupy.’ You know, ‘Occupy Mars.’ That’s what they did here 500 years ago. They want to still continue doing that. It hasn’t stopped. The genocide has not stopped.
They just wanna carry it on somewhere else like they did Apartheid. They sent one of their stewards [Elon Musk] over here to start it again. And they just went a little better and said, ‘Well, we’ll just buy out the government.’ And that’s exactly what they’ve done. And that’s what they’ve done.
For us there was a time when you could go back and forth across that Rio Grande. Because we have people on both sides. And those nations that were on this side were not dominant, but they were real aware of the presence of what was happening in Mexico City at the time. And so we were like a buffer zone. We always welcomed other people. That’s why I think history needs to be told from the perspective of us. That’s why I have challenged many of the authors [of Texas history] because they don’t wanna hear the old stories. They don’t wanna hear that Matamoros [Mexico] was on both sides of the river, that Reynosa [Mexico] was on both sides of the river. That’s what Reynosa was. And it wasn’t until the invasion, the second invasion into Texas by the the Texians that that happened.
Then there was a time where the whole Rio Grande was a republic. And they were kind of put down because of of that. And there were people who fought for the Republic of the Rio Grande because Mexico couldn’t make up their mind about the land.
And so we lived there. … We have our own language and our language was recorded. And they went looking for other languages that survived. The only one that survived was the Comecrudo in the Otomí language. And so I think that there has to be thorough research done on what happened there because some of the research that I’ve seen shows that we were always there.
Were you raised with your traditional language?
I heard lots of parts of it. When I was like 6 months old my grandma would bring some of the elders in to sing songs to me. Like, she saw something or felt something. My grandma was very spiritual in those ways. …
Today they have this generic god that they made up. And they absolve themselves to that god. They say, oh, I’ve gotta do this. I gotta kill people. I gotta hurt [people]. And this is the mentality that I hear.
And some of them don’t even care to ask for that forgiveness. They don’t care because they they feel like the absolution is there. They go against the Ten Commandments, but they use the Christian mentality to attack those who don’t believe that way. And the thing is, this is not a Christian nation. It’s a nation based on monopoly and fiduciary principles that don’t have nothing to do with humanity. When you see human beings as a product then there’s a problem.
Are you talking about capitalism?
I wouldn’t use the word capitalism.
But it’s an economic project.
Exactly. That’s exactly what it is, because we’re a product. And we’re a product that they can update or take out of the way. And that’s what genocide is.
What’s the alternative model that people can come to?
I think we need to sit down and start looking at the history of what happened. I don’t think there’s a pretty history here like what the Rangers did. The Texas Rangers. They’ve made them into this nice little law enforcement group. And I think it’s time that we start saying, you know, you need to get educated. How do I educate the public?
I’m afraid, but I don’t fear them. They can have and promote as much fear as they want because they’re afraid. They’re afraid to lose their power. They’re afraid to lose all that. So in their fear, they’re trying to defend the BS that they live in. And I can’t allow that to happen because they’re destroying this earth.
I always say, and this is one of the quotes I say to everybody: that 500 years ago we were invaded and occupied. This land is still invaded and occupied. And it still continues to perpetuate genocide. And now with what’s happening with the 14th Amendment is an effort of tribal erasure. What is tribal erasure? Same thing that that Hitler did in Europe and Germany. And so I have a new word for this whole thing. I call it the Anglo Euro Disease that comes with psychopathy.
I’ve read about when white people first came and there were a lot of Native leaders, spiritual leaders, who would look at them and say, ‘Oh, you have it.’ They were like diagnosing an illness. There was this hunger, you know. (Ed. note: This concept Lenape/Renape scholar Jack Forbes describes in detail in his book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism.)
You’re touched.
Yeah. And I thought, if it’s a disease, there’s gotta be a way to recover.
If you’re willing to do the recovery. What we have to do is educate the masses. And those masses are not being educated right now. And if we sit here and and do what some of the tribes do, they wanna support LNGs [liquified natural gas projects]. Because they say, ‘They’re gonna create jobs for my tribe.’ I think that you’re leaving out the real mentality. You don’t have no principles or no teachings or no knowledge, so you don’t have a culture. You shouldn’t even call yourself Native. If you go around using and appropriating the Native lands, the Native ways, to recruit more people into your churches then that’s wrong too. I think that’s appropriation of your own culture.
I don’t wanna say that I’m the only one who knows. But I’ve seen it a lot in my lifetime. They come in with a soft voice and [are] very spiritual about it. I come in with a soft voice but I come in with a with a big bat at the same time.
We talked about SpaceX a little bit before, which is establishing itself to be another frontier of colonization. Do you feel like people understand how important those efforts are?
I think that the majority of the tribal members around the country are aware of it and are even questioning their own councils. And I think it’s important to do that because of what we’re doing and, because we’re standing up for the rights of not just the Indigenous people, but human rights as well. Because we are human—and that’s what we call ourselves [Estok G’na or “human beings”]. We bought land with the help of others that blocks some of the pipelines and stops the supply of LNG that they’re still continuing to build and wanting to build. I’ve challenged the banks.
You’ve gone internationally.
Yeah.
When you said you’ve challenged the banks, I mean: you’ve been in Japan. You’ve been in Germany. And France. Italy.
I’ve gone to places that I never would’ve thought I wanted to be. And not that I don’t want to travel, but I like my lands. And so I’ve been there. And I’ve talked to [overseas investors in LNG]. I told them. I said you’re promoting this stupidity and this secular genericism does not absolve you at all, especially in Italy. And the French as well. But when I went to Japan, it was just outrageous to see what was happening there. I’ve been fighting the plastics thing too. And for me, it’s like having to tell them, you know, for 500 years we’ve been woke. You know? The wokeness comes from what happened at Dakota Access Pipeline [at Standing Rock], what happened at Two Rivers [in Big Bend], what happened at Balmorhea [in West Texas]. What’s happened at Yalui Village where for a year and a half we occupied land to stop a wall from being built on top of graves. We sued Homeland Security for what they did and we never settled. And so they had to start talking to us. And we finally are now monitoring where they’re going with this wall. The thing is there was nobody there before. They wouldn’t let anybody there. So legally, we’re there now. We can be there. We’re back on our lands.
Yalui Village is…
Eli Jackson Cemetery.
Deceleration Video: ‘Border Wall Fight: Eli Jackson Cemetery and the Underground Railroad‘
Right.
So that’s important here. Whether you’re rich or poor in the [Rio Grande] Valley, I think that you’ve been intimidated. We’re looking to maintain and to preserve and to protect. That’s all.
Standing Rock’s struggle over tribal water resources threatened by oil development brought so many people, so much attention, into the fight. Do you think people have just come to accept the reality of a militarized border and the erasure of tribal peoples here, the depletion and pollution of water resources here by oil and gas?
I think when it comes to a militarized border, you have to challenge the leadership of the politicians. They feel like they’re in a place of power. But there’s no power in trying to add to the fear and to the murdering of people of color. And when babies are torn up by the razor wire and all that kind of stuff: you’ve got to have a conscience. These guys absolve themselves because they think they’re doing the best thing for everybody else. They’re doing it for themselves.
You could talk to people along the river. I’m there. I’m there all the time. It’s like that thing that’s gone viral on Instagram: the kid running down the road and saying, ‘I haven’t seen a border patrol for miles.’ And he says, ‘Where are they?’ The thing is, they have surveillance cameras. They have the stuff. They know where you are. They know who you are. I don’t think the wall is necessary, the surveillance is so strong. I think that they played with the numbers. The state of Texas has played with the numbers of people coming in.
Well, they count them two or three times every time they cross or are sent back over.
And if there’s any kind of drugs coming through, they’re coming through the international bridges. That doesn’t say much for our people either. I mean, they should have the best surveillance there. So they should know who is carrying what. So you have to question what’s going on. To take a young Navajo person to jail because he doesn’t have his ID card, just because he looks brown, he looks Mexican. I mean, totally stupid. It’s the ignorance that promotes a fear that promotes more ignorance. It’s just never ending. When do we stop doing it? Here in Texas where they’re trying to get rid of critical race theory.
And everywhere else now.
And they wanna challenge the Constitution their forefathers wrote. You know, there’s something wrong. It’s not us that are wrong because we’re questioning them. It’s that they’re questioning their own forefathers and their own Constitution. And I think that that Constitution needs to be kept the way it is and maybe defined better. That’s why I have a new project. I’m gonna translate colonial English into real English. Because they speak from both sides of their tongue. And I think that’s what’s important here. When they say stuff like ‘critical infrastructure,’ and they pass a law [against] protest around critical infrastructure. And they say critical infrastructure is the [oil] derricks, any oil equipment they’re constructing. Because they wanna continue destroying the earth. And they have no connection to the earth. They have no connection to anything else. And to me, critical infrastructure is the air, the water, land, and the human beings.
And you’re saying that the way forward, the way we recover, is through remembering our history? From facing it directly?
That’s the biggest threat to this regime, And that’s why they are trying to eradicate all memory, all history of racial oppression.
What do you recommend for for folks who are maybe caught on their heels a little bit about over how quickly Trump and his team are attacking rights and trying to eliminate people from having rights?
They’re very tied into making America genocidal again. That’s what MAGA means to me. And so they’re ready to start erasing tribes by challenging the 14th Amendment, which is gonna be hard for them to deal with because it’s history. They don’t know anything about fucking history. And they’re the ones responsible for all this all this crap that’s going on. They’re responsible for the genocide that continues, the tribal erasure. They’re responsible for the detention centers. They’re responsible for the wall. They feel like they conquered something. But I’m not conquered. You might have conquered people that didn’t have a chance and were defenseless. I mean, I wrote a paper on on the ERG Stratification theory and in there was a whole theory about how you became assimilated and how you became acculturated. Well, I had to question it because: I was never assimilated. When you are forced and you are coerced and you are killed and murdered and raped, you know, and then told that you’ve assimilated into the culture…that’s not assimilation.
How do we change the narrative? They control the narrative right now because they talk through both sides of their tongue. And so you have to listen very carefully to what they’re saying and how they’re defining things—because they’re wrong. Not only are they wrong, they’re not correct. And they’re not proper.
How can people stay aware of what you and the tribe are engaging with and support you?
Well, the biggest thing we’re trying to do is to become more self determining where we don’t have to go around asking, you know, foundations to use our name to get more money so that we can be able to survive. I wanna cut out that middle man. I wanna be able to be our own self sufficient people. And we wanna do that by starting the first Indigenous community college in Laredo. Right now, we have to go ask the major universities, ‘Can we have a Native American studies course?’ So now we’re gonna have it, so we’ll teach it our way with our correct history.
We need to be careful of what we’re supporting. If you’re not voting Native, and you’re not voting pro Earth, then I mean you might as well not vote. You should vote, and vote for the people that are gonna do these things because it’s all about surviving, maintaining, and preserving who we are. And I’m not a protester. I’m not. I’m just a protector of our lands. Yeah. And that’s all I am. I mean, I try to protect the air, the water, and the land. Because those are the only things that are real.
People can support us by looking at our Facebook and our Instagram. We have a website and we’re trying to keep it updated. We have very low capacity and that’s why we’re needing funding. It’s always left up to a few people to do a lot of work and with all the travel that we’re doing now because they want us to talk to the banks and stuff, it’s really hard. The Saguaro pipeline is another pipeline going down through from the Waha Hub. All of this is coming from the Waha Hub.
It’s like Fort Stockton?
No. That’s over in Pecos. Between Pecos and Fort Stockton. Closer to Pecos. But Waha—Waha to us means clean air. That’s what it really means. And so it’s in our language. And then it’s right next to Kenosha. Kenosha means ‘big sister.’ So it’s very funny that these guys are over there in our lands with our names on them and say, ‘Well, I don’t know who the Carrizo were.’ Well it’s because nobody’s taken the time to understand that some places still maintain our names, like Toyah. Toyah means a watering hole. A hole of water. And that’s what’s there: The springs.
I think that people need to really realize that some of these performing people that are out there don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re just out there I don’t know for what.
So maybe it’s okay to feel good about being Native. But find out who you are. Be tribal because what’s being attacked now is a tribal way. It’s an infection. And eventually it’s gonna attack you too.
The Saguaro pipeline is going to go under the [Rio Grande] River and into Mexico through Tarahumara land. Through Otomi land. And then through Yaqui land. And down into the Sea of Cortez where they they’re building the Saguaro LNG. But this is not about the money. It’s about stopping that pipeline going anywhere. When [Energy Transfer Partners CEO] Kelsey Warren was on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, they bought Jefferson County’s bayou lands for preservation and wildlife refuge. First thing they did was run pipelines through there, and now he wants to run another pipeline through there into into southeastern Louisiana. It’s just sad. If you notice, everything’s going east. But nobody’s seeing where it’s coming from—from the west and what they’re doing to the west and what they’re doing to New Mexico and to the Pueblo peoples and to those reservations and all those are being affected by the water because they’re stealing the waters. Texas is. And they don’t care. Texas thinks they deserve it.
That’s the way Robert Duvall in ‘The Legend of Geronimo’ says…When they run onto that village [of scalped women and children] and they say: ‘Must be Texans. The lowest form of white man there is.’
You should see that one. It’s fine.
-30-
Preparing to Protect is a Deceleration series dedicated to checking in with targeted movements and communities as they gear up to bash back on the fascist and white supremacist forces that have captured the halls of power in DC (and many statehouses too). While our fight/flight/freeze/fawn instincts are real, Deceleration believes we must also withdraw our energy from the violent spectacle of kakistocracy and use it to tend to one another, cultivating the relationships, internal dispositions, and intellectual understandings that will allow us to enact new strategies for “blocking and building.”
