On Cliven Bundy’s ‘Ancestral Rights’

[struggle4progress]

If the Nevada rancher is forced to pay taxes or grazing fees, he should pay them to the Shoshone.
Jacqueline Keeler

... 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 ...

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 ...

http://www.thenation.com/article/179561/cliven-bundys-ancestral-rights

[951-Riverside]

1. Disgusting. This pig isnt satisfied with mooching of public land now he's putting in checkpoints...

This is the first time I've seen a photo of these checkpoints near bundy ranch.

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but apparently the sheriff and the FBI are perfectly okay with this.

[betterdemsonly]

2. Even Clive Bundy was telling the truth about his ancestors

the argument is dumb. He is saying no law passed after his ancestors got there should be respected or obeyed. He is saying we can never change the rules. Yes, the Indians do have a better argument, because they live long enough that the only families that lived were those who engaged in practices that were sustainable. Not so with Bundy. We know those settlers often engaged in ignorant and unsustainable land use practices, and unlike the Indians had a broader industrial society to fall back on when they messed up.