AJO — It’s all here at Lorraine Eiler’s booth in the 3 Nations Market and Swap Meet in Ajo. Cigar boxes, Halloween lights, lavender sachets. A night-light angel playing a flute and a display of dusty Arizona Highways magazines. Also a stunning and heavily-beaded maroon flapper dress.
Lorraine is an elder in her Hia-Ced O’odham community.
For as long as she can remember, she has advocated for her people. At 87, she is working as an alternate for the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council and is president of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance.
Lorraine is a local historian. A keeper of stories. Recognizing Hia-Ced O’odham people – their belongings and their lands – is how she makes it known that the U.S. federal government has failed to recognize her people and their lands as sovereign in Southern Arizona.
“My dad made our house out of adobe,” Lorraine says, describing growing up in a small off-the-grid home in the Sonoran Desert. “My great-grandparents founded that village” — Darby Wells, which is no longer inhabited and which is officially on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management.
Lorraine has spent much of her life not only working to reclaim her family’s land, but also to continue to build: knowledge, customs, community. The things that last.
Holding space for unseen Indigenous people is a lifelong work. Lorraine is a collector — of vases, figurines, all assortment of knickknacks and books.
A lifelong penchant for collecting has helped her amass things that matter to, intrigue and delight people. She’s begun putting her wares up for sale at the Ajo swap meet.
“I sell everything but the kitchen sink,” Lorraine says, sitting on an upholstered rocking chair close to her booth. “Or maybe everything including the kitchen sink.”
In front of her is an old-fashioned room heater. There she sits, rubbing her hands and patiently waiting.
The U.S. federal government officially recognizes 20 different tribes in Arizona. The Hia-Ced O’odham is not one of them. But Lorraine has become a voice that reminds people that, despite nearly going extinct, they can not only exist but also thrive.
She has amassed wisdom – from decades of living and from years of reading archaeological, anthropological and ethnobotanical books. She recently made a donation of hundreds of volumes to the Salazar-Ajo library, a branch of the Pima County Public Library.
Holding space, sometimes means giving. Lorraine has been thinking, for 15 years or more, about what to do with her voluminous book collection. She and a group of other authors and researchers based in Southern Arizona started talking about how the collections they had slowly built up for years could live on in their communities.
Lorraine says her book collection started with passing on what she has learned.
“Lean years”
Growing up, Lorraine never felt confined by material wealth.
“Not until high school did I realize that I was not recognized, that I grew up not on my family’s property but on BLM land,” she says.
She learned in high school that the land didn’t belong to her family or to her Hia-Ced O’odham tribe. She also learned that her tribe wasn’t recognized by the federal government. That set her off on a lifetime of investigation and compiling research.
As for the plates, vases and baubles, she says, “Maybe the desire to collect was the lack of having anything back then.”
“We had no birth or death certificates, we didn’t have rental histories,” Lorraine says. “We didn’t pay for utilities because we didn’t have them. We got water from the well my family dug, and we didn’t have electricity.”
She describes the 1980s as especially “lean years,” when Hia-Ced O’odham people were threatened to be “weeded out” of the registries or cut off from health services because they didn’t have ID cards.
“We weren’t considered a tribe of Indians because we had no proof,” Lorraine says.
That was when a group of Hia-Ced made a decision to join the Tohono O’odham Nation. But even that took years, Lorraine explains. The Nation adopted the Hia-Ced for a brief time as part of a district, but that dissolved and the fight for recognition continues.
Now they remain in a back-and-forth with the Bureau of Land Management to cede Darby Wells to the Nation. Nearby, and just outside of Ajo, the International Sonoran Desert Alliance is pushing to expand the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge to control development and preserve cultural heritage.
The sacred saguaro, a person with rights
In 2021, the Tohono O’odham Legislative Council officially granted saguaros legal personhood.
“When something is acknowledged as a person with rights,” Lorraine recently wrote, “it is much more difficult to overlook the infliction of harm.
She explains that it wasn’t just a creative legal construct they were harnessing to protect the environment.
“We’ve always seen saguaros that way,” she says. “Look at them, especially in the evening, and you see how they are.”
Lorraine says it was painful watching the destruction of saguaros that are sacred to Indigenous communities, especially during the building of the border wall under the Trump administration. That was in part what led to the legal push.
Some of those saguaros the border wall construction crews were ripping up or running over were older than the official existence of the US-México border itself — 200 or more years old — she says. The Government Accountability Office reported in September 2023 that construction crews killed saguaros, as well as other plants, during border wall construction.
“We’ve always had traffic,” she says, of the migrants passing through south of Ajo in record numbers in late 2023. The wall and U.S. border enforcement is different, she says.
“I have mixed emotions about it. I feel sorry for all the immigrants. I understand their need and their quest,” Lorraine says. She says it can also be hard on communities, and described how huge construction trucks used to tear through town as the wall was being built.
“There’s no wall that will keep people out,” she says. Tohono and Hia Ced O’odham people have always lived on both sides of what is now a walled international boundary. They still cross it in each direction to visit family and conduct sacred ceremonies.
“It’s not just keeping people out, it’s keeping people from going south to conduct ceremonies,” Lorraine says.
She says it’s painful to see the wall standing there, likening it to the feeling one may have for anybody who wants to go to worship in a place and is blocked.
“Whether it be a church, a synagogue, to be turned away by a wall,” she says, “it’s painful.”
“It’s a matter of sadness,” Lorraine says, “that some individuals could appoint themselves to put a halt to a way of life.”
Despite the destruction, despite the wall and despite ongoing lack of recognition, Lorraine sees hope. Young people are relearning the language, learning and studying their culture. The International Sonoran Desert Alliance purchased Ajo’s historic Curley School and turned it into an artist residence. The alliance also helped fund and renovate Ajo’s central square, which enlivened the town.
As the 3 Nations swap meet closes, Lorraine goes to sit in the square while the sun falls to the horizon and casts the evening sky in orange and deep blue. She reflects on the day and her lifetime of work.
Before the revitalization of the town, Lorraine says “Ajo used to be dead.” Now, “there’s life here again, and freedom.” She wants to help usher that same spirit of renewal further out into the desert and into her community.
As the evening cool descends and she gets up to leave, Lorraine reports that, a few hours ago, she had finally sold the beaded maroon flapper dress.
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