The armed band of protesters who have taken over administration buildings at a federally owned wildlife refuge near Burns, Oregon, have said they want the property returned to the ranchers who once owned those lands.
However, on Wednesday, the Burns Paiute Tribe demanded that if anyone should get the property back, it should be them.
Their ancestors were roaming the still wild and empty reaches of what is now called the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge perhaps as long as 15,000 years ago, members of the tribe said.
Photo: AP
“Don’t tell me any of these ranchers came across the Bering Strait,” tribal chairwoman Charlotte Rodrique said, referring to the ancient ice age land bridge between North America and Asia that was the conduit for native migration of the Americas.
“We were here first,” she added at a news conference on the reservation. “We’d like the public to acknowledge that.”
Other tribe members, in an even harsher denunciation of the group that has occupied the refuge since Saturday, said the protesters were a public menace and an insult to the local people.
“We, as Harney County residents, don’t need some clown coming in here to stand up for us,” tribal council member Jarvis Kennedy said, when asked about the protest group’s leader, Ammon Bundy. “We survived without them before.”
Residents in the rural area of east-central Oregon are sharply divided over the goals and actions of the protesters.
Some are rallying in support; others, led by the Harney County sheriff, say the protests and the potential for violence have become an economic and social threat to a struggling rural area as schools, government offices and some businesses have shut down out of safety concerns.
“This is having an economic impact,” Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward said. “If this goes any longer, it will have an even greater impact to our tourism and economy.”
The tribe’s position Wednesday, though, touched on even more nuanced questions of law, history and culture as the occupation at the 76,080 hectare wildlife refuge went into its fifth day: Whose land is it, anyway, and for what use is it now best suited?
People like Jason Ward, 33, who grew up there as the son of a timber worker who felled trees in Malheur National Forest, said he thought a combination of bad federal policies and greater federal control in Harney County had coincided with the area’s economic decline.
Cutbacks in the timber harvest in the national forest beginning in the 1990s, Ward and other residents said, led to the closing of a wood mill here that was one of the region’s biggest employers, and things never really got better.
About one in five residents in Harney County live in a household with income below the federal poverty threshold, according to federal figures from 2013. The county — which lost 4 percent of its population from 2010 to 2014, according to census figures — has the second-highest proportion of minimum wage jobs of any Oregon county, almost 10 percent.
Only neighboring Malheur County is worse off, according to a state report last month.
The Paiute tribe members said that their priority for the refuge — short of getting it back, which they said was unlikely — was protection of its natural and cultural heritage.
Tribe members regularly go there to gather reeds for tribal crafts and plants for traditional medicines.
Artifacts have been found there indicating a native presence going back thousands of years, they said, and part of the federal government’s mandate at the site is protection of those resources and artifacts.
Rodrique said her tribe, like most Native American groups, was deeply wounded in the past by the federal government.
“We were forcefully taken out of this country,” she said. “We’re a population that has experienced a lot of heartache by the actions of the US government.”
However, a wildlife refuge is something that benefits all, whatever the scars of the past, she said.
“We have had a good working relationship with the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge,” she said.
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