March 7, 2007
STUMBLING ACROSS OLD TRACKS
The New York Times has a fascinating article today on the use of Native American trackers by the federal government to ferret out drug smugglers along the Arizona-Mexico border.
TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION, Ariz. — A fresh footprint in the dirt, fibers in the mesquite. Harold Thompson reads the signs like a map.
They point to drug smugglers, 10 or 11, crossing from Mexico. The deep impressions and spacing are a giveaway to the heavy loads on their backs. With no insect tracks or paw prints of nocturnal creatures marking the steps, Mr. Thompson determines the smugglers probably crossed a few hours ago.
“These guys are not far ahead; we’ll get them,” said Mr. Thompson, 50, a strapping Navajo who follows the trail like a bloodhound.
At a time when all manner of high technology is arriving to help beef up security at the Mexican border — infrared cameras, sensors, unmanned drones — there is a growing appreciation among the federal authorities for the American Indian[*] art of tracking, honed over generations by ancestors hunting animals.
The Shadow Wolves unit of trackers, as it is known, is fairly successful: regularly seizing about 50 tons of illegal drugs annually. The government is looking to increase the size of the unit from 15 members to the full federally funded complement of 21. The feds are also looking into using members of other tribes to secure portions of the Canadian border.
After surveying the high-tech measures used to monitor ground and air traffic along the Mexican border, William Langewiesche wrote about trackers in his book Cutting For Sign.
As dawn broke one day I met Bob Antone in Sells, and we drove south in a four-wheel-drive truck across the reservation and toward the border gate at Papago Farms. Antone works for Floyd Lacewell; he is one of the Customs Service's O'odham trackers, a burly man of forty with longish black hair. He was dressed in jeans and lug-sole boots. Trackers are also known as sign cutters, because they "cut for sign." "Sign" is evidence of recent passage across the land––a tire track, a footprint, a broken branch. "Cutting" is the action that applies to it, whether searching finding, or understanding. It is a high art. Antone described his work as "Come out here, cut for sign, maybe jump a load." He is a man of few words.
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Antone drove at walking speed with his head stuck outside, looking down, checking the dirt for tracks, cutting for sign. He told me more stories: We found fresh tracks and followed them through the desert, an hour, a day, two days. We jumped the smugglers and arrested them. Or, we saw where they had been, but they were too fast for us and got away. Once he said simply, "Last week a guy found five hundred pounds of coke under a tree."
Langewiesche's work has large portions devoted to drug smuggling and the Native Americans of the O'odham Nation's involvement in it––both as smugglers and sign cutters. Of course, the author wrote his book 14 years ago in 1993.
* Has The New York Times altered its stylebook? Since when are we referring to the descendants of pre-Columbian Americans as Indians again? I thought we'd settled on Native Americans. Whoops, my bad. A quick search of the Times's archive shows that the paper regularly refers to this population as Indians.
Tagged: arizona, books, drugs, mexico, new york times, trackersPosted by Lexiphane at March 7, 2007 12:14 PM
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