The ongoing confrontation in Oregon between the US Government and Ammon Bundy’s posse and supporters in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has the local native Paiute tribe looking on with a great deal more concern than most. It’s all happening on the doorstep of their small community and town on land they have a claim to dating back 137 years, and they’re not happy about it.
Jarvis Kennedy, the Paiute tribal council’s sergeant at arms, said: “To me they are just a bunch of bullies and little criminals coming in here and trying to push us around over here and occupy our aboriginal territories out there where our ancestors are buried. They just need to get the hell out of here, we have a different approach. I’m sorry. Because we didn’t ask them here. We don’t want them here … This community is hard-working.”
“I feel like it’s happening all over again but to a different set of people,” one tribal council member said of the ranchers and their supporters’ anger. Historically, the tribe received federal recognition of their right to stay on the land in 1868 and signed a treaty with the federal government that requires it to protect the safety of the natives and to prosecute any crime or injury perpetrated by any white man upon them. Eleven years later however, in 1879 the Paiutes say their people were “loaded into wagons and ordered to walk under heavy guard in knee-deep snow and forced off their land on foot. They literally walked our people, children and women off our lands. They had no problem killing us,” Kennedy said.
The Paiute prefer a more diplomatic approach before resorting to lawsuits and guns and this is not their beef. “We have good relations with the refuge. They protect our cultural rights there,” said tribal council Chairwoman Charlotte Rodrique.
There is little question that at the very least, Bundy would had done well to have first consulted the Paiute before taking forced occupation of the land.
Bundy and his supporters are accusing the government of land grabbing from the local ranchers and breaching their land rights. Ammon Bundy’s father fought a similar battle with Nevada agents over grazing rights in 2012 and effectively ‘won’ that round. Bundy Jnr’s “self-styled militia” according to Reuters, has however perhaps picked the wrong battle here in Oregon as the protest moves into its fourth day with little if any progress and an unsupportive local native community.
Militia group ‘3% of Idaho’, commenting on the situation via their spokesman Brandon Curtiss said, “There’s a better way to go about things. If you want to make a change like that, you need to get the county citizens behind you and to go through the proper channels.”
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