Bundy met Thursday with Harney County Sheriff David Ward, who asked Bundy to heed the will of locals and leave the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Advertisement
Group leader Ammon Bundy has told reporters they will leave when there’s a plan in place to turn over federal lands to locals.
The leaders of the Burns Paiute tribe have a message for the men and women who have taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside Burns, Oregon: “Go home”.
But the tribe wants to avoid the increasingly prevalent gun-toting approach to grievances favored by the group led by Ammon Bundy, whose father had a similar standoff with federal agents over grazing rights in Nevada. Participants came from as far away as Arizona and MI.
Ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven, who surrendered on Monday to serve longer prison terms for setting fires that spread to federal land, were regulars at a diner in Burns where customers said they feared the federal government wanted to seize ranch lands for its own use. He said sheriffs from two other counties were with him.
“I’m here today to ask those folks to go home and let us get back to our lives”, Ward said.
The reaction to the takeover among residents of Burns, about 30 miles north of the refuge, has included sympathy for the jailed ranchers from the area whose plight inspired the action, and criticism of the armed protesters.
“We are not the militia, and we are not a militia”, he said, adding that he “they’re here for everybody’s safety, on both sides”. It’s the same sense of entitlement that white colonists used to kill native people and steal their land, enslave millions of Africans and forcibly obtain one third of the US territory in the Mexican-American war.
As the showdown stretches on, local Native American groups in the state are calling on the protesters to withdraw, claiming they have no right to occupy the federally-owned wildlife refuge. Still others said that the militiamen are highlighting important issues.
The Hammonds, who have distanced themselves from the group, were convicted of arson three years ago and served no more than a year.
She said she has seen people pushed, trampled by horses, and pepper-sprayed during protests in Cleveland, which is in stark contrast to the way law enforcement have handled the armed protesters in Oregon.
The argument is rejected by those who say the US government is better equipped to manage public lands for all those who want to make use of them. That case and the protests and occupation that followed highlighted the fraught relationship many in the West have with the federal government, which owns much of the land in a handful of Western states.
Federal and local officials have not moved to oust the group or arrest them. “They had no problem killing us”, Kennedy said.
Advertisement
The FBI has not made an attempt to take back the isolated building and said Sunday it aims to bring a “peaceful” end to the standoff. When that became widely known, the armed protestors began showing up at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. They vented about what they described as the government’s intrusion into ranching rights and overbearing federal regulations and pointed out that without the occupiers, their complaints about government behavior would not be so widely heard.
