The complicated history of who really ‘owns’ the land

[struggle4progress]

By Char Miller
January 7 at 6:00 AM

... For millennia, and thus long before settler-colonists arrived in the region, the Paiute hunted, fished and gathered in this fertile, albeit arid, terrain ... Battered into submission, crowded into a reservation and prohibited from acting on their treaty rights to hunt and fish off-reservation, in 1878, the Paiute fought back. Their brief uprising was crushed ... Their local reservation was shut down and its lands returned to the public domain. Under armed guard, the Paiute were marched through the snow 350 miles to the Yakama Reservation in southeastern Washington state ...

... dispossessing the Paiute allowed large livestock operations to take over, resulting in the rapid deterioration of grazing lands in the upper reaches of the Silvies and Blitzen rivers that flow into Malheur Lake. Further diminishing the lake’s capacity to sustain migratory and local bird populations were the irrigation and drainage projects that the Bureau of Reclamation .. built upstream ... With gold rush-like avarice, local hunters blazed away, and within a few years, the Malheur heron population was decimated. It was their extirpation – not the brutal mistreatment of the Paiutes – that caught the attention of the Oregon Audubon Society ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/01/07/the-complicated-history-of-who-really-owns-the-occupied-land-in-oregon/

[2naSalit]

1. And for present day info...

An organization working on the problems of these updated and poorly managed policies with a wealth of information.

http://www.westernwatersheds.org/

Thanks for the thread, there can't be enough of these right now. The positive side to this issue is that it brings the problems to the attention of the rest of the country.

[KT2000]

2. Good article

On the Daily Show, Noah said that the ranchers who sold to the government did so because their land was exhausted from poor management practices and the federal gov. bailed them out by buying the land.