The arrest of Ammon Bundy and many of his supporters last week left one man dead and a handful of protesters still occupying a federal wildlife refuge in rural eastern Oregon. Weeks after they first occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the question remains: What do they want? Ammon and his brother Ryan Bundy had issued an array of claims and accusations that resonate with many Western land users. Who are the enemies they confront? The federal government, the Bureau of Land Management and even Linda Sue Beck, a biologist at the wildlife refuge whose office they are occupying, draw the ire of the Bundy brothers and their followers.
Declarations of federal tyranny, divine inspiration and potential armed revolution provided a barrage of headlines, media musings and fodder for political analysts and late-night talk-show hosts alike. But why does this rhetoric sound so familiar and why are so many sympathetic to the message, if not the method? Because it’s based on the myth of the American West – a land of good guys and bad.
To many Americans, the West remains a place of nostalgia, fueled by decades of enthralling tales that reverberate with man’s conquest of an untamed land. It is a “West” occupied by cowboys and Indians, ranchers and pioneers, lawmen and gamblers.
It’s rife with guns and violence, where the good guy in the white hat takes a stand against a bad guy in a black hat. It is this imaginary West that infuses the rhetoric and misguided agenda of the Oregon protestors. One idea ties it all together: land rights.
The West, real or imagined, is about land and its claimants.
It remains a vast and largely unoccupied geographic space that encompasses a multitude of ecosystems and crosses numerous state and tribal boundaries. Federal lands, like those disputed by the Bundy family, are managed for the benefit of the nation. The Bundy brothers lease the land and must, like all renters, abide by the contract terms. The federal government rents grazing land at a price far below market value. But the Bundy family, including father Cliven Bundy, decided to stop paying the rent.
Ironically, Ammon Bundy’s objective is to reclaim control of “our land” for the local population. When he was asked what it would take to end the occupation, Bundy responded, “When the people of Harney County are secure enough and confident enough that they can continue to manage their own land and their own rights and resources.” Yet, it is not their land.
Throughout the 19th-century, the juggernaut of U.S.
expansion into the continental West was rapid and lucrative for many Americans. It was, however, often ruinous for the environment, and it shattered the Native American societies occupying the territory.
The West became a proving ground of an imagined American character and national fortitude. Mythical battles between civilization (“white settlers”) and “savagery” (Native Americans, cattle rustlers) were played out in deserts, prairies and mountains. For the Bundy encampment and its sympathizers, it was their contest and their battle. Character and manhood were to be tested. The protestors were the self-appointed white hats, standing up for misconstrued ideas of “freedom” and “liberty” in this most recent showdown.
But who are the black hats this time? An old and familiar opponent: the federal government.
At the beginning of the 20th century, activists, artists and scholars expressed a growing awareness about the vulnerability and value of the American West. This realization culminated in federal legislation that sought to both manage and exploit Western lands – spawning numerous agencies and a plethora of legislation.
Today, the federal government controls almost half the land in the American West. In some states, like Oregon, the feds control the majority of it. Among the network of federal agencies in charge are the Bureau of Land Management (the current nemesis of the Bundy brothers), the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Bundy has been claiming land and rights that dismiss a century of laws and legislation. He also ignores the land’s first occupants, the Burns Paiute, who continue to rightfully claim that land. He sidesteps his family’s dependence on government support and subsidies – which include a sizable federal Small Business Administration loan for more than a half-million dollars. He banters about a potential armed revolution while proclaiming his dedication to the U.S.
Constitution.
Bundy’s confused rhetoric is partly a refraction of spotty Christian theology, fringe militia movements and American mythology. Yet he is standing on solid ground in the imagined West in which his ideology resides.
