ADDS IDENTIFICATION OF ADRIAN SEWELL- Ryan Bundy, right, gestures toward Adrian Sewell at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in near Burns, Ore., Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016.
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Sewell posted a video on Facebook on Thursday in which he discussed what he was about to do.
“There comes a point in time in every person’s life that they feel the call of duty”, Sewell said on the video.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I truly believe that the battle is for your mind, but the war is for your soul”, he said. Sewell is a cattle rancher in Grant County, in the southwestern part of New Mexico.
Bundy, the leader of an armed group occupying the national wildlife refuge to protest federal land management policies, said Friday he and his followers are not ready to leave even though the sheriff and many locals say the group has overstayed their welcome.
“I’m very happy he came all the way from New Mexico”, the AP quoted Bundy saying.
Bundy has said he’s going to stay at the refuge until the group’s demands are met-“several months at the shortest”.
Roderique anxious that the protesters would finance the occupation by selling the artifacts. He told AP the federal government had turned grazing from a right to a privilege.What were doing is making sure its secured as a right. On Friday Bundy met briefly with a federal agent at the airport in Burns, but Bundy left because the agent wouldn’t talk with him in front of the media. Several federal laws protect native cultural properties. The takeaway is that two sovereign nations are now formally involved with the Bundy occupation: the federal government and the Paiute.
The group says there is too much government overreach and more and more land is being taken away from the people. Grazing on federal land, Nantz wrote, “requires ranchers to follow an unfair, complicated and constantly evolving set of rules”.
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is in Harney County, where local, state and federal law enforcement have convened to figure out how to deal with the occupation by the activists opposing federal land policy.
U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, is among those who have called for the prosecution of the occupiers in Oregon.
Midday on Saturday, a small counter-protest gathered on an overlook about five miles from the refuge, chanting for the group to go home.
The brothers, sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, also were involved in an April 2014 armed standoff near the elder Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville. “There must be consequences for this sort of unsafe action”.
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The Burns Paiute Tribe has expressed grave concern over the handling of cultural artifacts at the Refuge headquarters.
