Significant Impact

Contesting Surveillance Infrastructure on Tohono O’odham Je’ved
Caitlin Blanchfield, Nina V. Kolowratnik and Ophelia Rivas

Significant Impact brings together stories, essays, and narrative cartography in a counter environmental assessment to document and describe the effects of surveillance infrastructure on the Tohono O’odham Nation—a Native American reservation on the United States-Mexico border. A collaboration between O’odham Elder Ophelia Rivas, human rights scholar Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, and architectural historian Caitlin Blanchfield, the book advocates against militarized infrastructures on Indigenous lands and challenges common protocols of environmental review, along with the Western frameworks of scientific classification and property embedded in them. The project makes visible the impact of surveillance when considered through Indigenous sovereignty and an O’odham epistemology of land.

It offers a visual language that is sensitive to secrecy protocols within Traditional Knowledge and that challenges the colonial biases of Western cartography. The book situates current surveillance infrastructure projects on the Tohono O’odham Nation within a longer history of settler colonialism and border militarization, and reflects on the role of environmental review within the politics of protection in Indigenous lands.