“I never felt unsafe, even when you’re talking to someone who clearly has a sidearm, and that’s just because of the nature of ranching. You go around armed. No, I never felt unsafe, or really even unwelcome, just under more scrutiny. My name is Pete Zani, and I’m an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—Steven’s Point.”
Dr. Pete Zani has been studying lizards in the sagebrush country of eastern Oregon for fifteen years, mainly at a site called Wright’s Point, a huge exposed lava flow that towers like a blade hundreds of feet above the wildlife refuge below.
“So there’s this finger-like projection that comes out into the wetland itself, and it’s really close to the northern edge of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge,” Zani said.
Not many people had heard about the refuge or this sleepy community before last year, but that all changed on January 2nd, 2016.
“They got together in [the] Safeway parking lot, and they yelled and cheered, and got enough people to follow them out for the refuge, to take it over," said Zani.
Ammon Bundy led the charge. He had been in Burns for a month making plans, and multiple militia groups had followed him. They were protesting the sentencing of two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, after they were convicted of felony arson for starting brush fires on federal land and re-sentenced after being released to satisfy the mandatory minimum sentence laws. Here’s Ammon Bundy in his own words, taken from a statement after his arrest:
“The takeover of the Malheur Refuge was a needed action to show government officials that the people will not be complacent when they prosecute and bully good families like the Hammonds.”
I should clarify here that the Hammonds turned themselves in peacefully and have disavowed the occupation, which lasted 40 days. After accounting for police overtime, shut-down schools, and property damage, it is estimated to cost the taxpayers millions. Twenty-six people were ultimately arrested, and one man was killed in a shootout with police. In October, seven leaders of the occupation, including Ammon Bundy, were found not guilty of conspiracy charges.
The Malheur occupation has galvanized anti-government militias around the country, but what has it done to the community where it happened? I asked Pete Zani about what it was like before, and how things have changed.
“The mentality before the occupation, this is certainly a very politically conservative part of the country. Ranchers and people who support ranching communities tend to be very independent-minded in the sense that they don’t feel that they often need government to help them make their way, that they can make their way on their own. So communities like this, they’re isolated, sort of typical, rural America. Burns is only 5500 people when you combine it with the town of Hines. The two cities in Harney County have most of the population of the county, which is the size of Massachusetts,” Zani Said.
There’s also a tradition of working with federal agencies for conservation efforts. In fact, a collaborative management plan was finalized in 2013 that brought ranchers, environmentalists, and the Burns Paiute Tribe to the table with federal managers from the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“And then the local community feels like they can have a say because I think they do have a good connectedness between those different agencies and good communication between those bodies. And then what happened with the Bundys is the Bundys came in and the occupation, in essence, tried to impose upon the community a strategy of potential violence. [That] was really what they were espousing, the violent takeover, the armed takeover, of a national wildlife refuge, and potentially the armed takeover of the federally-owned lands on the BLM and Forest Service, and I think that’s what set people off the wrong way. That’s not how things were done here regularly, so trying to tell the people that’s how it had to be done, from just yet another outsider, didn’t go down all that well,” Zani said.
The occupation ended on February 11th, 2016, but nerves are still raw. Ammon, Ryan, and Cliven Bundy remain in jail on charges related to the 2014 standoff with federal officials in Nevada. The Bundys claim to receive divine messages inspiring them to confront the government in this way, and their supporters are equally passionate. I asked Dr. Zani if he expects more conflicts like these to arise.
“There are still areas where, if they rabble-rouse enough, I think the feeling is it could certainly happen again here. This really hasn’t gone away, so much as the underlying problems [such as] the Hammonds federal court case and the dissatisfaction with how the government agencies treat the land, I think is still an issue, and whether or not that’ll boil and come to a head is uncertain at this time,” said Zani.
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