But if there’s any group that has a legitimate gripe with the US government over ownership of local land, it’s not Bundy’s white, anti-government group. It would have said, “No, we’re not going to do violence and throw tea into the water”, said Gneiting, national chairman emeritus of the Independent American Party (IAP), who led that party for 4½ years until last year.
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Many locals have also denounced the group’s tactics. About half of its members live on the reservation, which isn’t on the wildlife preserve.
“They have rights as well”, Bundy said. They’ve made their case.
Other tribe members, in an even harsher denunciation of the group that has occupied the refuge since Saturday, said the protesters were a public menace and an insult to the local people. “It’s time for you to leave our community, go home to your families and end this peacefully”. About 22,000 ranchers use federal land for grazing each year.
Environmentalists and others say federal officials should run the land for the broadest benefits to business, recreation and the environment.
“It is our goal to get the logger back to logging, the rancher back to ranching”, Ammon Bundy said Tuesday. “They’re controlled and regulated by the government very tightly, and I think they have a right to be free like everybody else”, Bundy said.
The Burns Paiute tribe has guaranteed access to the refuge for activities that are important to their culture, including gathering a plant used for making traditional baskets and seeds that are used for making bread.
Rodrique said the armed occupiers are “desecrating one of our sacred sites” with their presence at the refuge. She said the tribe signed a treaty in 1868 with the federal government, and though the U.S. Senate never approved it, she expected the government to honor the agreement to protect their interests.
“But we don’t need them to back us up”, said the tribal council’s sergeant at arms, Jarvis Kennedy.
“Over the weeks that we were out there we promised the community that nothing would happen without their support, and obviously the community at that time didn’t support that step”, Soper told TPM over the phone Tuesday while driving back the 130 miles to Burns from his home in Redmond.
Randy Eardley, a Bureau of Land Management spokesman, said Bundy’s call for control of the land to be transferred makes no sense.
“They did their time, and now they’re back, and all of a sudden that wasn’t good enough, so the government went around for round two, to see if they can’t get more time”, he says.
The Paiute have their own disputes over land and water with United States government agencies. “We manage it the best we can for its owners, the people, and whether it’s for recreating, for grazing, for energy and mineral development”.
Ammon Bundy and his supporters arrived in OR after local ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven, were given longer prison terms for setting fires that spread to federal land, saying the government wanted to seize ranch lands for its own use. The arson, the government charged, was to cover up evidence of poaching on the protected Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by the Hammond family, who owned an adjacent ranch. “They’re now serving five years mandatory minimum of a sentence that the federal judge who sentenced them said would be unconscionable to levy”, the congressman continued.
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The Burns Paiute tribe joins a growing list of people who disapprove of the militant’s occupation of federal property.
