Malheur, Part II: “Ours but Not Ours”

[struggle4progress]

Part I here

By Anthony McCann
SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

... Suddenly the boys discovered that the land was chock-full of material refutations of the improvised historical narratives they were offering, and that these literally leaked up everywhere through the dust and the muck, threatening to change the story decisively: they would no longer be liberators of ranch land in the name of oppressed locals and of the holy Constitution, but rather yet another gang of armed and desperate white riff-raff, settlers from outside come to grab whatever they could muscle in on, with some flag-waving and mission-from-God talk as cover for the same old land lust ...

... The boys weren’t going to pack up history and hand it off, “respectfully,” to the “rightful owners.” “It’s not just the artifacts,” said Tribal Chairperson Charlotte Roderique. “We’re in the dirt. Our history and culture is in the soil. We’re still in the soil.”The problem for the Paiute wasn’t so much that there was dirt on the artifacts, or that animals had been in the boxes where they were stored, but that the artifacts were out of the earth at all, and being gone through publicly by a man whose words and actions, despite his constant repetitions of his desire to be respectful, were nowhere near appropriately reverent ...

In the end, the video did elicit a response, but not the one Finicum and his friends had hoped for. Two days after the video of Finicum in the artifact room was posted, the Burns Paiute wrote a letter to the US attorney general and the FBI urgently demanding action — the video was at the center of this escalation of pressure from the tribe ...

I had found on each visit out to the basin that it was as Jarvis had said — I could see them there, moving among the reeds, smoke coming from the wickiups that themselves looked like big clumps of sage. Maybe reed boats nosing through the reeds on the lakes. Sentimentally, I began to imagine the voices of children, as I thought also about something Charlotte had told me, about learning as a child to make baskets of the tule that grew here — baskets for egg gathering. She was taught to whip one together in a few minutes right there in the marshes. She was also taught by her grandmother that, when she found a nest of eggs, she could only take one if there were at least three; she had to leave one for the birds, one for the coyotes, and then if there was one extra she could take it. While looking out over the lakes and finding it surprisingly easy to picture the scene Jarvis had suggested, I also noted how different that landscape would be to me if I had, like Charlotte, been taught to weave baskets of the reeds that grew there. It would be a different experience if I had often gone stepping quietly through the marshes in search of those nests with at least three eggs, and if I had done it under the tutelage of a grandmother who reminded me that little girls like myself had done the same for thousands of years, right here, where I walked ...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/malheur-part-ii-not/

[Ford_Prefect]

1. Another aspect of strangled history is the connection between the old south, the old west, LDS

Imperial expansion and the cultural lies told to justify all 3 empires. They converge in the locale of the first Bundy Bunkerville, Nevada uprising but have older and deeper roots.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/constitutional-crisis-in-the-heart-of-dixie/


SEPTEMBER 4, 2015
Constitutional Crisis in the Heart of Dixie
by CHRIS ZINDA

A civil war has been underway in the American West for the past 150 years and “sovereign” activists are gearing up for the Western Freedom Festival this October in Cedar City, Utah – the heart of Dixie.
It is no coincidence this event is happening during a presidential election season. And, it is no coincidence it is being organized by Utah politicians.

The West’s Dixie
To understand why the “sovereign” movement’s focus has moved from the South and to the West let’s take a moment for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) history.

Mormon people were persecuted. They were killed and driven from New York, then from Illinois to the territorial west. LDS culture to this day reminds members to never forget the persecution the “pioneers” endured. One could say it is a religion, like many others, with a complex.

The Mormon intent was to be separate from the United States – regardless of what the Louisiana Purchase had to say. Brigham Young sent people far and wide, into Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, California – even Mexico – to expand the boundaries of an eventual nation state. He developed an army to protect it, known as the Mormon, or Utah, Militia. They call it Deseret.

The author goes on to explain the historical combination of Brigham's vision, refugees from the collapse of the Confederacy, and ambitious Mining and Oil interests leading to the subjugation of Native Americans, denial of Federal authority, the Reagan era "sage brush rebellion", and the rise of the Bundy crime family.