By Lawrence Hatter, WSU assistant professor of history
A long-running dispute over land use in Oregon escalated into the armed occupation of the federal Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a “militia” led by the rancher Ammon Bundy on Jan. 2. Bundy and his followers dispute the constitutional right of the U.S. government to manage public lands in Oregon, which was also the cause of a standoff between Ammon’s father, Cliven, and federal officials in southern Nevada in 2014.
The decentralization of power advocated by these armed rebels, who wish to see local authorities, rather than the federal government, administer public lands, has a long tradition in U.S. American political discourse, dating back to before the American Revolution. Bundy’s rebels, however, are on the wrong side of history. Their understanding of the history of public lands represents the failed experiment of the early 1780s before the United States embraced a colonial vision of American imperial expansion in 1787 that would direct the successful colonization of western lands from the Ohio Valley to the high desert of eastern Oregon.