While on trip to John Day. Shots were fired. Details are just emerging:
http://katu.com/news/local/leader-of-oregon-occupation-ammon-bundy-three-others-arrested
Here is my original post on the day they took over Malhuer and the history of the Burns Paiute.
This ten-minute documentary tells the story of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the dictionary she created in an effort to keep her language alive.
A Bolivian miner poses uncomfortably with El Tio.
The Aymara of the Andes have a saying: everything on the earth and above it belongs to God; everything under it belongs to the devil, whom they call El Tio (the Uncle). When they work the mines, risking life and limb for high wages, they understand they are making a deal with the devil, and they pay homage in the form of offerings of coca leaves and alcohol in dark shrines that dot the tunnels of Bolivia.
It’s a fair metaphor for the rest of the world. Just about every form of pollution, be it greenhouse gases, acid mine runoff, or urban smog, comes from bringing that which is below ground to the surface.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the hills above Los Angeles. Natural gas well SS 25 in Aliso Canyon was drilled in 1953; it is 8,750 feet deep. In 1979, its leaking safety valve was removed but not replaced—because the well was not within one hundred yards of a home. On October 23, 2015, the Southern California Gas Company (subsidiary of Sempra Energy) lost control of the well. Natural gasses, mostly methane, under pressure, erupted from the well, and have continued spewing vast quantities of greenhouse gasses into the air ever since. Company officials now say they may not be able to stop the leak until late March 2016.
While the leak has been compared the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, so far it has carried a much quieter profile. That’s because it’s invisible except if you use infrared technology, as demonstrated in the remarkable aerial and ground-based videos linked here. The nearby community of Porter Ranch, however, can smell it and feel it in their throats. To date, over 11,000 people have been evacuated and two schools closed. Air traffic, including planes flying into Burbank, has been re-routed, due to fears a plane could produce a spark that would ignite the 1,000-foot-tall methane cloud. If it does ignite, either from the ground or the air, expect thousands of videos to inundate YouTube as the denizens of the San Fernando Valley look north in surprise.
Officials and environmentalists alike have been shocked to learn the quantity of greenhouse gasses spewing from the leak: about 1,000 metric tons of methane each day (or over 25% of the entire state’s daily methane emissions). Assuming the leak persists for five months, it will release 150,000 metric tons.
Because not all greenhouse gases are CO2, they are converted into CO2 equivalent (CO2e) based on their effects on the climate. While methane is a far more potent contributor to climate change than CO2, it is shorter lived in the environment; it degrades faster. Over a 100-year time horizon, it is 25 times more potent than CO2; if we use a 20-year time horizon, focusing on the critical next two decades when greenhouse gases may peak, it is 72 times more potent (some use 86 times). Thus, the well accident total of 150,000 metric tons of methane is equivalent to 10.8 million metric tons of CO2.
Using the 20-year time horizon (and a factor of 86 rather than 72), the Environmental Defense Fund is live-tracking the amount of methane and CO2e released.
Let’s put this in perspective. California, which has committed itself to landmark legislation to reduce greenhouse gases, estimates its emissions each year from all sources (e.g. transportation, industrial, agricultural, residential, etc.). From 2000 thru 2012, the state has seen a slight increase and recently a slight decrease in its emissions. In recent years, California has emitted about 460 million tons of CO2e annually. With this well accident, which accounts for over 2% of the entire state’s annual CO2e emissions, the state will almost certainly see an increase in greenhouse gas emissions next year.
The volume of the leak has been equated with putting seven million new cars on the road, or five times the CO2e emissions of the BP oil spill. Chris Clarke has compared the emissions to all the electric cars that Californian’s have purchased, or investments in solar energy, or other lifestyle changes that average citizens (like myself) have done to reduce emissions. I lost quite a bit of money buying a poor electric car years ago before the technology was figured out; I’m currently sitting in a 62-degree house to reduce my natural gas use. Much of these efforts, certainly mine but also statewide, have been swamped by SoCal Gas’ release. As Clarke puts it, “Some of us spent significant amounts to reduce our climate footprints, only to see a huge chunk of those overall gains wiped out by one gas well owned by one corporation.” The emissions from the leak have also swamped Sempra Energy’s purchases of wind power that it claims for CO2e reductions credit.
Short of planting an estimated 93 million new trees, the entire state’s greenhouse gas emissions targets for future years now need to be re-adjusted. This will affect every business, vehicle, farm, and person in the state, a multi-billion-dollar liability for Sempra. True compensation is impossible, as we all need to be doing all we can to reduce greenhouse gases anyway; there is no “extra” left to do. Nevertheless, Sempra should be taken over by the government, or have its profits garnished, each and every year until they have reimbursed the people of California (and the world) for the climate costs of their accident.
Porter Ranch, with gas well towers on the hill tops, and the invisible plume of methane.
They made a deal with the devil. They poked holes in the earth and they ignored critical safety measures in the interest of saving a few bucks. They lost. In another sense, however, all of us who are their customers (of any mined product, be it oil for our cars or copper for our iPhones) have made that same deal. We are the Bolivian miner living off the benefits of the devil’s subterranean jewels, hoping to live the good life that El Tio offers us.
and a more recent addition here:
I woke up this morning to the news that heavily-armed white ranchers (some call them “yeehawdists”) had taken over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon. This is one of the premier wildlife refuges in the West; I had visited it last summer. Yellow-headed blackbirds perched on cattails while hundreds of bank swallows swooped overhead. From the visitor center I watched a couple young great-horned owls in a cottonwood while three species of hummingbirds danced around the feeders on the porch.
That porch is now occupied by radicalized whites, led by Ryan and Ammon Bundy. They are the sons of Nevada ranching pariah Cliven Bundy, who successfully frightened off the feds in an armed standoff in 2014; he still owes over $1 million in grazing fees. In Ryan Bundy’s own words today, they are “willing to kill and be killed if necessary.”
Why are they there? It’s hard to say. They are vague about their reasons—stuff about land and resources and Constitutional rights. The precipitating cause is the legal problems of two convicted arsonists: Dwight Hammond and his son Steven. They are cattle ranchers who own land adjacent to the refuge. In 2001 and 2006, they deliberately started fires on their own land — they claim to clear brush; the feds claim to cover up shooting small herds of deer– but the fires spread to federal lands. They were convicted of arson in 2012. Under an anti-terrorism law that governs mandatory minimum sentencing for arson on federal property, they should have received five-year jail terms. However, the judge concluded that sending a white rancher to prison for that long for such a paltry crime would “shock the conscience”, so Dwight and Steven served three months and one year in prison, respectively. The federal government appealed, however, and won. The Hammonds are supposed to report back to prison on Monday, January 4, to serve out the remainder of their five-year terms.
Saturday, January 2, there was a rally in support of them at their house in Burns. Enter the Bundys. They arrived from out of state and steered a group of fellow radicalized ranchers thirty miles south to Malheur, where they overtook the refuge headquarters. They occupied the buildings and called for fellow radicals from around the West to converge at Malheur to support them. All schools in Harney County have been canceled due to the threat of violence.
While the Hammonds have disavowed any connection to the Bundys, they do have a long history of conflict with the wildlife refuge. They claim a right to run their cattle across it without a permit, based on a “historic right of way” since 1871. “We have a right to use it,” they claim. Their cattle have trampled habitat restoration areas and destroyed streams and wetlands. They made death threats against the refuge manager in 1986, 1988, 1991, and 1994. In that last year, the NWR revoked their permit to graze on refuge lands. Both Hammonds were then arrested for obstructing the building of a fence around the refuge, but were eventually released after Representative Bob Smith (R-OR) got involved. The deeper issue, in which the Hammonds, Bundy, and Smith all agree, is their perceived right to run cattle wherever and whenever they want on federal land.
The land in question, however, was stolen from the Northern Paiute, specifically the Wadatika band, known today as the Burns Paiute. Any argument that claims a right from 1871 must consider the years immediately prior to that.
A sign at a rest area along Highway 20 just west of Burns tells the story. Ranchers flooded the area in the late 1800s, resulting in armed conflicts with the Paiute band. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant created a 1.8 million acre Malheur Reservation, giving the Wadatika much of the lush farmland east of Burns. The reservation was meaningless. Within four years, choice portions of it were carved up and given to white ranchers for their cattle. In the words of the highway marker:
“Denied access to traditional lands, the Wadatika soon faced starvation. Continued encroachment, combined with the US Government’s failure to fulfill promises of food, shelter, education, and agricultural supplies, resulted in open warfare—the Bannock War of 1878. Upon defeat in 1879, the Paiute were forcibly marched to distant reservations [near Yakima, WA]. Congress terminated the Malheur Reservation in 1883 and made the land available for settlement.”
Today, the rich farmland that was the reservation is all in private hands (over 90% white); the mountain portions are mostly held by the federal government in the form of Malheur National Forest. The Burns Paiute Reservation is now just 11,944 acres, located just north of Burns. The tribe is largely excluded from the farmland it used to hold. Impoverished by a century of forced removal and other injustices, they now lease some grazing land to white ranchers for income.
Ammon Bundy has declared, “We are using the wildlife refuge as a place for individuals across the United States to come and assist in helping the people of Harney County claim back their lands and resources.” I’m guessing he is not including the Burns Paiute.
The land just south of the Malheur Reservation, incorporating Malheur Lake and adjacent wetlands, all historic Paiute land, was retained by the federal government. In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt declared it the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), largely to protect egrets that had been decimated by plume hunters. In 1935, the government purchased the Blitzen Valley south of the lake from the Eastern Oregon Land and Livestock Company, adding to the refuge.
Since then, petulant cowboys and federal authorities have been fighting over the spoils of ethnic cleansing. White pioneers and ranchers have a long history of being treated with kid gloves by the federal government. Whether they be gold miners exterminating Native tribes in California in the 1850s, taking over the Black Hills and contriving a war to steal them in 1875, running their cattle thru the Kaibab Reservation in 1915, or Cliven Bundy occupying Shoshone land in 2014, the federal government has ultimately backed off and let the white pioneers have their way. When Oglala Sioux staged a similar take-over of Wounded Knee in 1973, in part due to cattle grazing by white farmers, they were met by federal snipers, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers within hours. When Mary and Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone, took a similar stand for grazing rights, their cattle were rounded up by helicopter.
Make no mistake that being a domestic terrorist with impunity is a privilege of being white. Jokes are spreading across the internet comparing these dangerous armed radicals with Tamir Rice in Cleveland with a toy gun, or Eric Garner in New York brazenly selling loose cigarettes; people of color whom the authorities dealt with far more quickly and aggressively.
The Bundys need to be arrested and imprisoned; they are a danger to the public. If anyone deserves special rights to access Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, it is the Burns Paiute, who are still owed considerable compensation. They just aren’t waving guns in the air.
#nativescience
#malheurcounty
#armedprotest
#burnsoregon
#burnspaiute
My town, Davis, is known as a liberal college town, a bastion of progressive thought. Nevertheless, the local paper, the Davis Enterprise, published this editorial a few days ago.
One of the more accurate depictions of the first Thanksgiving.
Here is my letter to the editor in reply:
Dear Editor,
The day before Thanksgiving, the Enterprise published an absurd and racist account of the Thanksgiving story that has no basis in reality, promotes negative stereotypes of Native Americans, and contributes to the divergent views of history that separate American whites from people of color.
The story emanated from an old Art Buchwald column, explaining the American holiday to the French. It was apparently told to students at Davis High for years. It explains that the Pilgrims sought a colony in the New World “where they could shoot Indians and eat turkey to their heart’s content.” It then describes Native Americans as cannibals, who taught the Pilgrims to grow corn “because they liked corn with their Pilgrims”. It uses the term “les Peaux-Rouges”, French for “redskins”. The story explains that the Pilgrims decided to have a feast of thanks because more corn was raised by the Pilgrims than Pilgrims killed by the redskins.
Nothing in this account is remotely true. The Pilgrims, vastly outnumbered by their Native hosts, sought to avoid conflict. The Wampanoag were not cannibals and did not kill a single Pilgrim at the time of the first Thanksgiving meal in 1622, which in fact celebrated a mutual defense pact negotiated between the two peoples that would last fifty years. The term “Thanksgiving” did not evolve until fifteen years later, when the Puritans massacred over six hundred Pequots, burning women and children alive. It was an attack that violated all norms of Native American warfare and shocked the Natives allied with the Puritans, who implored them to stop. Instead, the Puritans sold the survivors into slavery in Bermuda and banned the name “Pequot” to complete the genocide.
While historians point out the deft negotiating strategies of the Sachem Massasoit, this story presents Native Americans as murderous cannibals. Spoof or not, it echoes back to the centuries when they were referred to as savages, and to the mid-1800s when the term “redskins” was used during extermination campaigns. This mythic account promotes the sad state of affairs where most people are far more familiar with negative stereotypes of Native Americans than they are with actual facts. In fact, the Wampanoag remain today. Along with Native American communities across the country, they struggle to raise their children in an environment that continues to celebrate their conquest and dehumanize them.
______________________________________
Claremont McKenna College is a small private college in the Los Angeles area known for its politically conservative culture. In 2012, the college’s Campus Climate Task Force surveyed students and found that “variation among responses by Black and Latino students was more pronounced,” concluding “there are also those who feel disenfranchised.” They made a long list of recommendations for changes on campus, detailed in the final pages of their report. Eight months ago, CMC’ers of Color made a similar list of demands, which they have currently reduced to just four items.
Campus life, however, changed little. Students of color reported, among other things, proposals for a “Colonial Bros and Nava-hoes” themed party (which generated nationwide controversy at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo last year). In recent weeks a number of incidences have generated controversy. It began with offensive Halloween costumes and, especially, the motivation by students of color to speak out in protest and re-assert their demands from eight months earlier.
In response, some conservative students have responded aggressively against the students of color, generating a hashtag “#shushPOC” (POC = People of Color). This hashtag is both paternalistic– “shush” being a term that parents say to young children– and evokes centuries of oppression when the voices of people of color were silenced. Either the creators of the hashtag are completely ignorant of history or actively prefer a nation with racial censoring, red-lining, profiling, and segregation. It should be pointed out that there is no diversity training for incoming freshmen during orientation week at CMC, nor is there racial sensitivity or diversity training for faculty and staff, which is surprising for an educational institution.
The most dramatic development in recent days was a protest held by the CMC’ers of Color in which they re-iterated their demands and called for the resignation of the Dean of Students, with whom they had both long-term and recent grievances. Shortly thereafter, she resigned. The faculty, at least 102 of them, have signed a statement supporting the students of color.
The mobilization of the marginalized students led to an editorial by some conservative students, entitled “We Dissent”, that is stunning for its lack of emotional maturity and respect for diversity. The need for some basic diversity training is clear both in the editorial and in the comments posted under it at the Claremont Independent, a conservative paper at the Claremont Colleges. The editorial fits squarely in the extensive on-line literature I would call #whitepeopletellingbrownpeoplewhytheirfeelingsarewrong. The editorial takes particular aim at the students’ of color request for a “safe space”, essentially a meeting room. A letter to the editor of the Claremont Independent countering this article was posted at a different website. The letter describes “We Dissent” as an example of “the most inflammatory and polarizing fringe journalism.”
It is not clear to me why the concept of students of color meeting alone together is so threatening. I don’t get why any student would object to another student’s feelings and requests for help, especially when those requests are in keeping with the college’s own recommendations. I don’t understand why basic respect, understanding, and support for fellow students is a political issue. It would do them well to watch this video on basic respect for people that are different from you.
Here is the conservative students’ editorial with my annotations: We Dissent comments by SH
On this date in 1892, Ned Christie was killed by US marshals asserting federal sovereignty on Cherokee land. Ned Christie, branded a Cherokee outlaw, had been on the run for five and a half years. On this morning, he had his back to the double-logged wall of his stronghold as he turned and peered through the gun portal. He saw about twenty US marshals crawling through the woods outside and they’d brought dynamite this time. As a Cherokee senator and an advisor to the chief, he fiercely opposed the railroads coming thru their land. Then he was accused him of killing a US marshal.
Ned was not the first hero outlaw in these parts. Twenty years earlier, there was Zeke Proctor. He also ran from US marshals. He said he didn’t mean to do it. It was a crime of passion involving two lovers. He meant to kill the white man and not the Cherokee woman, but she jumped and he shot and she died and the white man got away injured. But it was not just Zeke who was on trial; it was the entire Cherokee nation, for Zeke was on trial in a Cherokee courtroom with a Cherokee judge and a Cherokee jury. They had relocated to a log-constructed one room schoolhouse to better defend themselves. Everyone was armed—the judge, the lawyers, the members of the jury, even some in the gallery—for they knew the US marshals were on their way from Fort Smith to arrest the defendant and take him away to a white man’s court.
At the trial, Zeke sat at a table at the far end facing the door. To his left were his attorney and the judge; to his right was his brother. A juror yelled Look out! They’re coming to get Zeke Proctor! Zeke saw a relative of the victim coming through the door, marching down the center aisle with a double-barreled shotgun, followed by several US marshals. Zeke’s brother stepped in front and pulled those barrels toward him as the first one went off. Simultaneously shots were fired from all sides as the jury and gallery dove under their benches. By the time it was over, seven marshals lay dead, along with three Cherokees, including Zeke’s brother and lawyer. Zeke and the judge were injured. The next day the trial resumed and Zeke Proctor was acquitted.
The Cherokees won that battle. The original federal case against Zeke was dropped and the US agreed that the Cherokee court had jurisdiction after all. Zeke was a US marshal by 1892.
But Ned was not getting that deal. In the interim, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act, asserting sovereignty on Indian lands in cases of murder. The US marshals were coming and Ned was out of ammunition. He grabbed his empty rifle, opened the door, and charged into a hail of gunfire.
US marshals pose with Christie’s body in Fort Smith, Arkansas. This would be a violation of international agreements today.
A week later his body was on display at Fort Smith, Arkansas, where they sold postcards to tourists of the white posse posing with his corpse. He was eventually buried back at his home in Wauhillau, but even there he got little rest. His headstone was subject to vandalism and, fifty years later, it was stolen.
It’s a fascinating twist of history that they don’t have it already, but Native Hawaiians are now taking steps toward federal recognition and sovereignty.
Culturally, this is no doubt important. In the legal realm, however, “sovereignty” as defined by the US Supreme Court and Congress, is not all it’s cracked up to be. See this discussion on the limits and erosion of tribal sovereignty.
Memories of the People 
Since the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a self-styled militia of heavily armed, disgruntled ranchers (which I describe in this blog post: More Range Wars and White Privilege), the local Burns Paiute have addressed the issue specifically. Here is a sampling of the news coverage:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/06/462179325/native-american-tribe-says-oregon-armed-occupiers-are-desecrating-sacred-land?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news
http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/burns-paiute-tribe-reacts-takeover-ancestral-land-group-clowns/
https://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/oregon-native-tribe-bewildered-by-gun-toting-glory-hounds-that-land-belongs-to-the-paiute/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tribe-member-american-indians-would-have-been-dead-by-now-if-they-protested-like-oregon-militants_568d8bc8e4b0c8beacf58547
and this video statement from Burns Paiute tribal council member Jarvis Kennedy:
http://www.kgw.com/news/burns-tribe-says-armed-activists-desecrating-oregon-land/11701540