When Wynona Larson Yazzie saw construction equipment near an ancient Indigenous ground etching in Arizona last month, she started praying. Crews working to build out President Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall bulldozed across it just hours later, she said.
The Las Playas Intaglio, a gigantic fish-shaped carving important to Native American tribes like Larson Yazzie’s, suffered severe damage April 23. Contractors ran heavy machinery over the 1,000-year-old geoglyph located in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, marring the image with a roughly 50-foot-wide scrape mark. The Washington Post first reported on the damage last week.
The administration is fast-tracking its border wall construction, in part by using provisions of the 2005 REAL ID Act, which allows for certain projects to bypass environmental, cultural and public health protections while building border barriers.
“The significance of this site was not unknown,” said Verlon Jose, chair of the Tohono O’odham Nation, in a video posted to social media. “It had already been identified. It had already been marked as a place to protect, and yet, it was still lost.”
