Disparate treatment stokes frustrations
On the same day seven defendants celebrated their acquittal in the armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, law enforcement officers dressed in riot gear and firing bean bag rounds arrested 141 oil pipeline protesters camped out in North Dakota.
The sudden developments in the two protests drew an unsettling contrast for many between the treatment of mostly Native American citizens at an encampment near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the heavily armed occupiers who held the federal government at bay for weeks in remote, southeastern Oregon.
“How is it that people who were seen on national media with guns having a standoff with police officials were acquitted ... and we’re being treated like we’re terrorists?” said Cody Hall, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota and a spokesman for the pipeline protesters.
Yet experts on public land policy who have watched both situations unfold cautioned it is too soon to draw conclusions about either protest’s outcome — and pointed to broad yet important themes that underlie movements otherwise separated by hundreds of miles and an ideological chasm.
Both the Standing Rock Sioux and the Oregon occupiers consider themselves marginalized groups fighting to preserve a way of life. Both movements feel disenfranchised and are disillusioned with federal land policy, said Gregg Cawley, a University of Wyoming political science professor.
“At that level, even though all the details are different, they’re very similar,” Cawley said. “If you step back far enough ... then you can start seeing some parallels here.”
Ammon and Ryan Bundy, neither native to Oregon, seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January in a protest against the imprisonment of two ranchers convicted of setting fires on public land. More than two dozen others eventually joined the 41-day occupation, which grew into demands for the U.S. government to turn over public lands to local control.
On Thursday, jurors acquitted the brothers and five others on felony charges that included conspiracy and possession of a gun in a federal facility.
In North Dakota, hundreds of Standing Rock Sioux tribal
members and their supporters have held a monthslong campaign to protest the Dakota Access oil pipeline, which would skirt the reservation’s northern border. The tribe says the 1,200-mile pipeline will damage its water supply and endanger sacred sites.
The same day the Bundys were acquitted, law enforcement officers in North Dakota arrested 141 people who recently moved their encampment from a public plot to land in the pipeline’s path that is owned by its developers. The protesters face misdemeanor charges, including trespassing and engaging in a riot.
Public land policy experts cautioned it’s too early to make meaningful comparisons between Standing Rock and Oregon.
“These folks on the pipeline have just been arrested, but we don't even know if any of that is going to hit a trial,” said John Freemuth, of Boise State University. “I certainly think the tribes will have a point if they find themselves arrested and in jail and these Oregon guys get off.”