A recent investigation from Grist, a U.S.-based nonprofit media organization, raises questions about environmental activist Juan Mancias’ Indigenous claim to the land he works to protect in the U.S. state of Texas.
In 2017, Mancias traveled to France and helped pressure French banks to withdraw support for oil and gas projects that he said threatened ancestral Indigenous lands and a rare coastal ecosystem. Since that success, the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe, which Mancias is the chairman of, has received recognition in the United Nations and financing for environmental work.
The Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe isn’t recognized by U.S. federal or state governments; Indigenous groups seeking recognition must establish a substantially continuous tribal existence as an autonomous entity. Experts believed “Carrizo” or “Comecrudo” people disappeared from the area after violence, disease or assimilation dramatically reduced their populations.
For years, Mancias has said that his grandfather and dozens of tribal families fled their Rio Grande homeland in the 1940s and moved north to the Texas panhandle where they blended in with Mexican farm workers. According to Mancias, they kept their culture alive, secretly speaking their native language and sharing oral histories.
Mancias says he lives by two guiding principles from his grandparents. His grandmother told him, “Know your people, know who you are,” while his grandfather told him, “Go get our land back,” according to news reports.
It’s a compelling story and one shared by other Native American peoples, Grist reported.
However, Grist found inconsistencies in Mancias’ account that raise questions about the accuracy of his family history. For example, he has repeatedly cited an alleged 1871 document describing a massacre of the Carrizo/Comecrudo people. However, the original document to corroborate that event has never been produced, according to Grist.
“I know that it exists somewhere, and maybe they changed it,” said Mancias. “I didn’t make it up.”
Grist examined genealogical records for Mancias and found that his Indigenous ancestors likely lived six to seven generations ago in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental mountains, not the Rio Grande delta, the historic territory of the Carrizo/Comecrudo.
In the 1990s, Mancias established a nonprofit under the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribal name and raised more than $5 million for environmental work opposing the U.S.-Mexico border wall, oil and gas development and SpaceX operations in the region.
Some have raised concerns about the impacts of false identity claims in the U.N. system. Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council, told Grist that funding for unsubstantiated Indigenous groups, “may be taking funding, time, representation, and resources away from Indigenous Peoples’ and their organizations that are really struggling to participate.”
The Schmidt Family Foundation, First Nations Development Institute, Rockefeller Family Fund, Sierra Club and others have helped fund the Carrizo/Comecrudo’s environmental work.
“We do not fund based on identity,” Joseph Sciortino, executive director of the Schmidt Family Foundation, told Grist. “Our job as a philanthropy is to support important work, not to serve as the arbiters of who does and doesn’t get to be Indigenous.”
Banner image: Juan Mancias. Image courtesy of Sharon Ellman, Associated Press.
