What did LaVoy Finicum die for?

Aaron Bady

... To “patriots” like Finicum and the Bundys, the movement to reclaim public lands from the federal government is a variation on America's cowboys and Indians story, but in their version they're the cowboys and the Indians. On the one hand, they position themselves as the descendants of men and women who first won the West, the settlers who originally built this country. On the other, they see themselves as the victims of a huge land grab, locals who have been forcefully dispossessed. That makes them both an oppressed minority and the conquering heroes of manifest destiny.

To understand this precarious and contradictory position — which sits at the radical edge of a larger, well-funded land-transfer, anti-environmental movement that seeks to privatize public property —- we have to go back to this nation's original sin. When the United States took the West from its first inhabitants — by treaty, deception and force of arms — the government put forward .. much the same doctrine that Finicum preached around the West to ranchers groups; he called it “productive beneficial use.” Put simply: the land belongs to those who use it productively, those whose ranching, farming and stewardship benefit the land ...

In 1812, the General Land Office began overseeing the disposal of the lands the United States government was busily acquiring in the West. The Preemption Act of 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862 supplied guidelines for the disposal; the former gave land to those who were already farming it and the latter to those who applied to settle it. But the underlying principle was the same: having taken the lands from the native peoples, the federal government was to be only a temporary steward of the land until it was given to a “productive beneficial” user ...

The commission's 1970 report — “One Third of the Nation's Land” — argued that “most public lands would not serve the maximum public interest in private ownership” and urged the “reversal of the policy that the United States should dispose of ... public domain lands.” In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, repealing most of the old disposal laws and dictating that public lands would be “retained in Federal ownership in perpetuity,” except for special cases. Though the Bureau of Land Management leases the land for development and a variety of commercial uses, their official mandate is to keep the land open and accessible to all users, preserving it for the future ...

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-bady-malheur-ideology-20160207-story.html