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The occupation is in its sixth day at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Those individuals illegally occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge need to decamp immediately and be held accountable, she said.
Ward got a lot of support during a packed community meeting Wednesday night.
“The protesters have no right to this land”.
“You know, who are the rightful owners?” says Rodrique. “It belongs to the native people who live here”, tribal leader Charlotte Rodrique said.
The takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in OR has been all over the news, as a group of armed ranchers are demanding the government give back the federal land to “the local people”.
Authorities haven’t removes the group of roughly two dozen people, some from as far away as Arizona and MI.
Rodrique and Kennedy said the Paiute people spent their winters in the area long before settlers, ranchers and trappers arrived. 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.
Locals said they sympathized with the armed group’s complaints about federal land management policies but disagreed with their tactics.
The group, which calls itself the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, said it will leave when the imprisoned ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, are freed and the federally owned land in Harney County is relinquished to local ranchers.
“We are not in the least bit ashamed of the actions that we have taken”, Bundy said. “We do not pose a threat”.
Ammon Bundy greeted Atkins with a side hug and invited him to come talk with him and his brother. He said a “collective effort from multiple agencies is now working on a solution”. But environmentalists and others say US officials should keep control for the broadest possible benefit to business, recreation and the environment.
“We wish to establish a safety perimeter of protection for the occupiers so as to prevent a Waco-style situation from unfolding during this peaceful occupation”, leaders of the group said in a statement posted on its website.
The remote high desert of eastern OR became the latest flashpoint for anti-government sentiment as armed protesters occupied a national wildlife refuge to object to a prison sentence for local ranchers for burning… “Everybody in the United States owns that land….” “We’re here because the people have been ignored”.
Critics of the federal government argue that it often oversteps its authority over land use. Guillen made the comparison with the Jordan Cove LNG Pipeline, a private enterprise that hopes to build across several miles of private land with eminent domain granted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
He said he went out to the refuge Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights.
“There are some positives that could come out of this”, Harney County Sheriff David Ward, accompanied by colleagues from two other counties, told Bundy and his group.
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They are protesting the sentencing of two OR ranchers to five years in a federal prison after they were convicted of arson for setting fire to federal lands. A judge ruled in October that their prior terms for the arson – three months for the father and one year for the son – were too short under federal law.
