Malheur, Part I: Sovereign Feelings - #BundyTeaParty
By Anthony McCann
SEPTEMBER 7, 2016
... For them to say theyre going to give it back to the rightful owners, I had to laugh, Tribal Chair Charlotte Roderique said at the conference. I figured I better write an acceptance letter for when they give it back to us. Tribal Council member Jarvis Kennedy was more direct: They just need to get the hell out of here ... Kennedy summed up the history thus: we werent removed; we were killed and ran off our land ...
The entrance of the Burns Paiute into the dispute troubled the leadership of the Bundy militia in a more significant way than any other issue that surged up during the principal period of the occupation. Their response to growing and widespread opposition to their actions in Burns among other sectors of the community, on the other hand, seems to have been an unwavering faith that their vocal supporters in the county were the true majority, as one by one they continued to prod local ranchers to take advantage of the opportunities they were offering ...
The Indians, however, were something else altogether. They refused to speak with the Bundy crew at all, not wanting to grant them any legitimacy, while offering a history that totally undermined the Bundys own made-up history. That made-up history claimed to show that the lands of the refuge had somehow originally belonged to ranchers who were dispossessed in the early 20th century by Teddy Roosevelts creation of an Indian reservation (without Indians), to quote the Bundy Ranch website. The alleged fake reservation was, in the Bundy story, merely the pretext for a federal land grab in the name of allegedly endangered birds (birds that were actually being hunted to extinction for their feathers by outsider professionals seeking big paydays from the hat industry). As is often the case in conspiracy theories, elements of historical truth stubbornly poked through the faked-up Bundy history, like the obsidian shavings, tools, baskets, and points that constantly emerge from the dirt of the Malheur Refuge. Yes, Indians were involved in this history, but they werent fake, and now they had shown up. It turned out there had been a real reservation one the federal government had actually dissolved at the demand of an earlier generation of white ranchers and settlers ...
Ammon Bundys wishes of freedom for the tribe, which accompanied his profession of ignorance of their existence, were quickly undermined by his own brother, Ryan, who was widely quoted as saying that the Paiute had had the claim to the land, but they lost that claim. He followed up his might-makes-right assertion with a further justification that rang strange coming from an armed reactionary: the current culture is the most important. The Bundy movement certainly seems more a war on the current, dominant culture than a defense of it ...
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