First Nations | A native voice criticizes Bundy’s claim to ancestral grazing rights
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Faith Spotted Eagle and Tom Genung at the Cowboy and Indian “Reject and Protect” demonstration. |
Moderator’s Note: Last week, I started writing an essay criticizing
the discourse surrounding the Clive Bundy protest in Nevada over grazing rights
on what is technically BLM (Bureau of Land Management). We say “technically”
because the lands claimed as ancestral by Cliven Bundy really belong to the Shoshone Nation under the Ruby Valley Treaty.
Our last post on the struggles led by the Dann sisters of the
Shoshone
Nation to restore these tribal lands was posted in March of last year in
an essay by UW student, Lologo Salatielu Lologo, who focused on the
limits of environmentalism without native autonomy.
As
I was completing the essay that was about to reiterate Lologo’s analysis, this
excellent essay by Jacqueline Keeler appeared in The Nation magazine on April 30 and adapted from the original
appearing in Indian Country Today media Network (ICTMN) on April
23. I don’t normally repost such works but decided to share this with my
readers because of the importance of the message: The only ancestral land
rights being violated today in Nevada, or any other occupied territory, are
related to the sovereignty of the First Nations.
It is our privilege to
present Keeler’s voice and announce that Faith Spotted Eagle, a lead organizer
of the Cowboy and Indian Alliance, will offer a word in the near future on continued activism against KXL and land grabs.
Cliven Bundy’s Ancestral Rights, How About the Shoshone?
Jacqueline Keeler | The Nation | April 130, 2014
If
the Nevada rancher is forced to pay taxes or grazing fees, he should pay them
to the Shoshone.
In
the wake of his comments wondering if “Negroes” were “better off as slaves,”
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy has gone from a right-wing folk hero to a
right-wing embarrassment. The Fox News commentators and Republican senators who
championed his cause just a few days ago are in full retreat, denouncing Bundy’s
remarks as “beyond repugnant” and “beyond despicable,” as Sean Hannity recently
put it.
That
they certainly are. But even before Bundy made his outrageous slurs against
African-Americans, his insurrectionary claims were already racially loaded.
Bundy has repeatedly trumpeted his “ancestral rights” to have his cattle graze
on land administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management without paying
taxes for the past twenty years. “My forefathers,” he has said, “have been up
and down the Virgin Valley here ever since 1877. All these rights that I claim
have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage
and the water and the access and range improvements.” A simple search of Clark
county property records by KLAS-TV, a Las Vegas television station, however,
revealed that his family had purchased the ranch in 1948 and had only begun
grazing cattle on it in 1954—eight years after the founding of the BLM. KLAS
reporters also received a map from the Moapa band of Paiute Indians showing how
the land the Bundy ranch is on was promised to them by federal treaty.
As
a Native American, I find Bundy’s late-nineteenth-century claims of “ancestral
rights” presumptuous, since by law all remaining pre-emptive rights in Nevada
belong not to late arrivals like the Bundy family but to tribes that have lived
in the region for thousands of years. This inability to take seriously the “ancestral
rights” of American Indian nations within the United States is not limited to
Bundy and his supporters. In Oregon, farmers in the Klamath River Basin were
shocked by a 2002 ruling that found the Klamath tribe possessed senior water
rights and could turn off the water during drought years. Last year, Tom
Mallams, vice chairman of the Klamath County Board of Commissioners, was quoted
by The Wall Street Journal as saying, “They shut water off here, there could be
some violence.”
Even
as many Americans continue to deny the existence of Native nations’ “ancestral
rights” to land and resources, the libertarian right is eager to co-opt our
history to promote their own battles against the federal government. Last year,
gun control opponents circulated on Facebook and Twitter the graphic photo of
frozen Lakota victims being buried in a mass grave at Wounded Knee with
taglines saying “Wounded Knee was among the first federally backed gun
confiscation attempts in United States history. It ended in the senseless
murder of 297 people.” A meme also made the rounds then featuring a vintage
portrait of a Native leader emblazoned with the words, “I’m all for total gun
control and trusting the government to protect you. After all, it worked great
for us” around his face.
Disregard,
if you can, the incredible callousness of using such tragedies (my great-great
uncle was a survivor of Wounded Knee) to limit restrictions on sales of
automatic weapons and to prevent waiting periods for gun purchase—all of which
have been shown to save lives. Instead, I would like to explain the very real
difference between these two fights: one for the sovereignty of pre-existing
nation states on this continent and one for what Bundy and his supporters call
the “Sovereign Citizen” movement, which basically translates to: they make up
the rules.
Native
Americans, for one, are more than just an ethnic group or simply just American
citizens. Until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, most were not citizens of the
United States and were still just citizens of our own nations within the
borders of the United States. But for many full citizenship with voting rights
did not come about until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So for most of US history,
the only real citizenship Native Americans could claim was to their respective
Native nations.
When
tribes speak of “being nations,” they are not being poetic or nostalgic, they
are speaking of the real political status our nations hold internationally. There
are tribes that issue passports. States have no jurisdiction over our lands
(something they dislike greatly). And the constant discussion of honoring
treaties is not something to be taken lightly, either. The US government signs
treaties only with other nations, not with ethnic groups. These treaties are
ratified by Congress, and under international law, a nation-state cannot treaty
away its sovereignty. Hence, Native Nations still exist. Under US Indian
Federal Law, we are called “Domestic Dependent Nations,” a term I dislike
because the designation relies on a concept of public international law known
as the Discovery Doctrine. This idea comes out of a fifteenth-century Papal
Bull that awarded the land titles of “discovered lands” only to Christian “discovering
nations.” Non-Christian “discovered peoples” possess only the right to exist on
the land, similar to the rights of animals. To this day, this doctrine
underlies much of US legal claims to the land within the United States. The
doctrine is itself a denial of the basic right of Indigenous peoples to title
to their land.
Bundy’s
hullabaloo is particularly ironic considering that the Western Shoshone Nation’s
claim to the land predates his own. He has declared he will only recognize the
original sovereignty of the state of Nevada, despite the fact that Nevada did
not achieve statehood until 1864 and as such has no pre-existing claims to
sovereign status. Only the thirteen original colonies possessed sovereignty
prior to the creation of the United States. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo with Mexico gave up Mexican claims but did not guarantee Indigenous
land rights. Shoshone sovereignty over the area in which the Bundys graze their
cattle was recognized by the US via the Treaty of Ruby Valley (1863)—a treaty
that did not include any land concessions.
In
1979, the US government attempted to legitimize claims to Shoshone land (which
encompasses nearly all of Nevada) by paying $26 million to the Department of
the Interior for 24 million acres. It should be noted that the Department of
the Interior is a branch of the federal government—hence the government paid
itself for Shoshone land. In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled that this payment to
the Department of the Interior constituted Shoshone acceptance of payment for
their land. In 2004, the US attempted to distribute $145 million as payment for
Shoshone land in Nevada. Seven of the nine Western Shoshone tribal councils
have refused to accept this payment and are holding fast to their demand that
the original treaty be honored. In 2006, the same year the US District Court
for Nevada dismissed Shoshone claims, the United Nations Committee for the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination found “credible information alleging that
the Western Shoshone indigenous people are being denied their traditional
rights to land.” So if Cliven Bundy wishes to pay taxes or grazing fees—he
should pay it to the Shoshone.
Contrast
the armed and primarily white standoff at the Bundy Ranch to the peaceful “cowboys
and indians” stand-offs ongoing in South Dakota and Nebraska, where Native
American and white landowners have joined together to fight the Keystone XL
Pipeline. They have held peaceful tipi encampments along the pipeline route and
recently composed a piece of giant crop art in a Nebraska cornfield that says, “Heartland
#NoKXL.”
I
find the unity being forged in the Cowboy Indian Alliance far more interesting
and representative of the true ideas of our collective nationhood. The very
origins of the United States can be traced to speeches the leader of the
Iroquois Confederacy gave to the colonists the generation before the Revolution—speeches
that were published by Benjamin Franklin’s printing press. It is indigenous
ideas of what it means to be a people and of democratic rule that are the
inspiration for America itself. It make sense then that it would be my Yankton
Dakota Sioux relatives and farmers and ranchers from South Dakota and Nebraska
who are leading the fight for a new idea of what American will be in the
twenty-first century.
My
dad’s cousin Faith Spotted Eagle has been active in the fight. When I was home
in South Dakota at the Yankton Sioux’s Fort Randall tribal casino last August,
I found Faith busy holding a conference with white ranchers and farmers from
Bold Nebraska. There, they formed the Cowboy Indian Alliance and united their
efforts to protect their water and their way of life on the land against the
pipeline. Last week on Earth Day, they took their message to Washington, DC and
held a tipi encampment on the Washington Mall all week. All of those beautiful
tipis facing the Washington monument were a sight to see. On Saturday, they
presented a specially painted tipi to the National Museum of the American
Indian as a gift to President Obama, reminding him of his obligations to
protect the water and the land.
In
Dakota, we call such encampments tiyospaye,
a word that means more than just a circle of tipis. As my great-great aunt Ella
Deloria wrote, tiyospaye represent how “all Dakota people were held together in
a great relationship that was theoretically all-inclusive and coextensive
within the Dakota domain.” The bounds that tie us together as a people through
kinship are what makes us Dakota (“allies”) and without it we cease to exist as
a nation or as they say in Dakota, Oyate. It is this lesson that will carry the
day, not the tired and divisive ideas of Bundy and his militia.
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