I went camping with my family at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge when I was around 15 years old. I had just gotten a cell phone. Despite the natural beauty that surrounded me in the southeastern Oregon desert, that cell phone was the most exciting part of my trip. At the surprise and horror of my parents, their choice of campground had but one fatal flaw: cell phone service. I bet you can guess how that trip went.
In January when the news broke about the Bundy’s and their patriotic stand, I couldn’t wait to talk about the implications of wilderness and stakeholders and actors and activism in this class. And we did! We approached the Malheur Occupation through a text-based analysis. Using tools such as Voyant Tools and the Oxford English Dictionary, we mined the primary texts of the occupiers and their supporters for big words. While it was rather easy to deconstruct their rhetoric, my exploration of Cliven Bundy’s press release revealed many levels (and big words) of a belief system very foreign to my own. These are religious beliefs. These are economic justice beliefs. And these are peoples’ lives and livelihoods. I am reminded of Mark Dowie’s Conservation Refugees. There is certainly an argument to be made that real injustice is in the hands of the US governments land policies (which is obviously not a new phenomenon re: Native Americans). How far back can we go? How far back should we go?
We only looked at the rhetoric from the occupiers point of view. A more in depth exploration of this event would look at the many different sides, represented by the different actors and their (dis)associations as shown in this actor network. This event is a part of a huge network of people and histories. An analysis of this event cannot be conducted inside of any sort of vacuum. By comparing this movement to others (perhaps not in the same way the Bill Maher attempts to in order to disparage college students and armed insurgencies with the same stone), I believe important distinctions and similarities might be discovered. One of the most poignant comparisons that has been drawn is that between the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the Malheur Occupation (see here).
We also gathered most, if not all, of our information from media sources. The media is far from objective. Similar to my reflections about how quantitative analyses should be considered in context of authorship and bias, all of our perceptions about Malheur and the occupiers should be digested along with a healthy level of skepticism. This is certainly in part why we examined primary sources. As illustrated by this New York Times piece, members of the media are important actors and players in the entire spectacle. When thinking about how big words are framed in the world, letters can be manipulated much in the same way as numbers can. When thinking about the narrative of events like these, its incredibly important to consider the narrators. To return to my anecdote, if a fifteen year old loved the cell service at the wildlife refuge, what would her parents think? The birds? The armed gunmen in the visitors center? The New York Times reporter?