This essay comes from material excluded from a more general piece on
land privatization on Everyday Feminism – please read that one here!
Seizure, Ownership and
Bias
At the beginning of 2016 – which
now feels so very long ago – a tiny, unspectacular, but beloved corner of our
home state erupted into global fame. A
crew of neo-con cowboys from Nevada strutted up to the federal buildings of the
Malheur Wildlife refuge – a wetland sanctuary in a remote desert that protects
and shelters thousands of birds along the Pacific flyway – cocked their rifles,
hoisted up their belt loops, and stomped inside. They thus began a forty-day armed occupation
that captivated public interest and inflamed debates over rural land practices in
western states. The saga evoked warped fantasies of an old
west golden age where white men claimed power with the clarity of steel, and it
simultaneously consumed many Oregonians with visceral rage.
On Tuesday, Judge Anna Brown found four
participants the occupation guilty of a range of misdemeanor offenses, such as trespassing,
tampering with vehicles, and damaging government property. The ruling followed
a widely-publicized case last fall, in which a jury acquitted the leaders of
the movement – brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy – of conspiracy to impede
government employees from doing their jobs.
Many questioned the strategic wisdom
of prosecutors attempting the high legal bar of conspiracy charges, as opposed
to, say, the much more accessible charge of trespassing. Many others voiced shock and outrage that dozens
of white men decrying the authority of the state and openly inciting armed rebellion
managed to hold their ground, unthreatened or impeded by law enforcement for
forty days, and escape – save one (in the final standoff/highway chase between
officers and militia, state troopers shot and killed LaVoy Finicum) – with their lives, with no criminal convictions, and
no threat of retribution.
During those chaotic months, the
Bundy family and their conspirators wrested the communities and conflicts of
Harney county from their relative obscurity into an unending world-wide news
cycle. As appalling as the actions of
these self-congratulating ranchers were, it was also disturbing, as a child of Oregon's political land struggles, to see Buzzfeed
essays with insultingly glib titles like, “The Top Ten things you Need to Know
to Understand the Malheur Refuge Occupation,” and to hear cattle grazing fees
discussed on the SavageLove podcast.
It
felt invasive to have one of my treasured pieces of hallowed desert and granite
and lava tubes and Mesozoic lake beds and blood memory suddenly laid barren for
urban pundits of the Atlantic seaboard to unpack, even though I know quite well
that my feeling of connection to the area is nothing of particular righteousness. Those feelings prompted more essential questions of who has rights to land, what do those rights mean, and why are they, or are they not, respected? (Those ideas are more essentially questioned in this piece)
I fear that the bungled trial and
resulting lack of charges for the Bundy leaders might embolden other violent
white men to take up arms in park offices across the nation. However, these events, now coinciding with our
current national crisis, highlight how the systemic and institutional
inequality in our nation rests on the defining battle of western America: the
questions and tensions of private and public land. These divisions and definitions are not only
integral to the struggles of conservation and climate change playing out slowly
in the vast west of craggy overhangs and stalking mountain lions and jagged
ridge lines and careful slot canyons.
These tensions display an underlying narrative of the imperialism,
intricately crafted racist institutions and power imbalances that our democracy
tenderly hinges on.
The History of Federal
Land
Not long after the signing of the
Declaration of Independence and before the end of the Revolutionary War, the
Second Continental Congress began encouraging the existing states to cede their
territory to the federal government. A few
years later, the Land Ordinances of 1784 and 1785, and then the creation of the
General Land Office, capitalized on that super swell idea and said, basically,
“HEY LOOKIT THERE’S A LOT OF SPACE OUT THERE.
LET’S JUST KEEP WALKING TOWARD THE OTHER OCEAN AND LIKE, TAKE IT?? WE
WILL BE VERY POWERFUL AND GRAND YES OK EUROPE WILL NEVER MAKE FUN OF US AGAIN!”
Or, as you learned in US History class “Tales of the Dark Side” edition, the
feds sought to encourage “westward expansion” by opening-up the world west of
the Appalachians to migration, travel, and homesteading, and started annexing
land as new states and territories. People moved west and occupied more land, the
Federal Government continued making more purchases and wars and treaties and coin
tosses, and probably strip poker bets, and eventually, we ended up with about
450 billion acres of federal public land in the country – with the vast
majority of that in the 17 western states.
And here’s a good place to point
out how deeply flawed and biased our narratives of “westward expansion” are. That’s pretty much the narrative I learned as
a kid in an Oregon public school. But do
you notice how the actual violence, seizure, theft, occupation, and war that
settler colonialism enacted on indigenous peoples gets happily coded as
“westward expansion?” How the story of “American land” always seems to start in
Philadelphia, in 1775, and move steadfastly westward with the trumpeting chorus
of an army of white-faced angels?
The
echoes of the divine proclamation of euro-centric manifest destiny still
reverberate in our garbled and skewed national memory, and in the tracts of the
public school system that is often FUNDED by those very same stolen lands. Let’s always keep that in mind whenever we
rehash the history of lands and America and people and space and questions of
who gets to be where.
By the early 1800s, lots of folks realized
that ranching was a pretty stellar way to make a living in the new west –
grazing cattle and sheep on public lands all summer, and bringing them back
closer to a home ranch for winter. This
went on as the amount of cattle and sheep quadrupled into the tens of millions
by the end of the 19th century, and soon, people started complaining
about the abrupt degradation of grasslands and habitat. In the past 100 years, there have been a
series of acts and shifts in public opinion that have limited and changed the
number of ranchers and the amount of herds that can wander around foraging on
federally owned lands all growing season.
People started realizing that the mass production of cattle on high
desert prairies is devastating to ecosystems and causes irreparable damage to
riparian systems, as well as rather unrepentently violent. They also began to push back against the use of public
funds for the profit driven interests of a few.
It’s more complicated than this, of course, but other resource
extraction based industries - like mining and logging – have similar patterns in their (rather short) history.
In the 1970s and 80s, a movement
called the Sagebrush Rebellion argued for the transfer of federal land holdings
to individual state management. That’s a
refrain that probably sounds familiar, because in general, it’s a trend that’s
in line with Republican party standards – boo to federal government, yay to
state control. But critics retorted that
this would only serve to hurt citizens even more, by pushing the burden of
expensive land management onto states with even smaller budgets to try and make
up for it. With no clear plan as to how
states might manage, many critics of the movement decried it as a scheme for land
privatization – in which the government would eventually end up selling tracts
of land off to private interests, who could manage them “better” than big old
unwieldy bureaucratic governments, and do what “private” interests are
ultimately supposed to do best in our glorious free market – make a
profit.
Today, ranchers like those who
participated in the armed seizure of the Malheur refuge are also vying for
private control of federally owned lands.
And while some of their concerns might seem like something compassionate
activists might be sympathetic to, the push to transfer lands from federal
government to private ownership is not something that is in the best interest
for people who are interested in a free and equitable society. Remember, that when we say “federal lands,”
it doesn’t mean authoritarian ownership and control. Don’t think fascism. Think Woody Guthrie (the version with all
the lyrics).
This land, in theory, belongs to the public – you – and it’s simply held
in trust for you to be managed by governmental agencies, because you don’t have
time for that. Is it perfect? No. Is this land we’re on already the result of a
vast and horrifying centuries long illegal occupation? Yeah. But is it better to take a stake in responsibility
as one of the people to decide how
this land should be brutalized, scavenged, gutted, scoured, trammeled, or
treasured, trod, travelled and lovingly utilized, than, say, Wells Fargo,
Halliburton, or Ammon Bundy and his punk kids?
I think so, because I think therein lies our opportunity to move toward a different world.
Environmental Struggle must be the Workers’
Struggle
It is essential for anti-racist activists, feminists, and
environmentalists to factor in how conceptualizations of property and land are
knotted up in our oppressive institutions, and to seriously consider the threat
of land privatization as a fundamental threat to a free society. And if that’s the case, we must realize that the
private investment in resource extraction and land ownership for profit is essential to the machinations of an
oppressive world.
There is no way to unwind the
oppressive cycles of race and gender without understanding them as completely
wrapped up in a capitalist conceptualization of property ownership and the
history of land. And in that, we must
register that our coalition for a free world must be based on the bonds of
struggle between the earth and all oppressed people. Our struggle against pipelines is our
struggle against violence and imperialism but it is also our struggle against
the adulation of profit for few from the work of many.
This is why I fear the inappropriate
position the Malheur conspirators occupy for many rural workers who struggle. They see men like
the Bundy’s claim to represent the desires and best interests of working men in
rural places. But men like the Bundy’s
lie. They are not there for the people –
they are there for themselves and for their own profit, just as cattle ranchers
are not there for the good of the people or their heritage or the land as they claim but to continue building their own wealth at the sake of all else til they die.
When land-owning, well-connected,
wealthy white men adopt renegade, vigilante rhetoric and reference civil
disobedience and civil rights, they commandeer the narrative of actual history
and make their acts of violence invisible or sympathetic. In
this fashion, the Malheur refuge occupiers repeatedly referred to the
regulations of government on public land as acts of “terrorism” against men
like themselves. But the contradiction of being
anti-government and anti-establishment, while invoking the supreme
righteousness of the range-land property owner above all others, is rather
extraordinary.
And as much hope as I try to salvage in
the power of federal land ownership, the powers of the state are, overall, on
the side of the white-supremacist history of European-American property
management. The institutions of the
United states are, when it comes down to it, not only singly invested in
supporting the needs and desires of this very tiny, specific class of people, the
state was designed for it. Thus, ranchers, miners, timber industry
barons and wildlife-refuge occupiers must carefully balance the irony of being the historic and present
establishment, while propagating their power via anti-establishment
positions. When we allow the privileged
to co-opt the language, position, and struggle of the oppressed, they silence
actual oppressed people, they stomp down on their stories and pain and grind it
into the dirt.
Provocateurs like this invent a false
narrative that drives divisions between native people, white rural Oregonians
(et al), workers in the cities and the valleys, farmworkers, and environmentalists.
We must not allow misconceptions and
poorly told myths to make enemies of those who should be our comrades, and
discolor the reality of the world in which we live.
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