The federal government’s treatment of rancher Cliven Bundy, who has invoked land rights in his objection to paying grazing fees for his cattle, stands in stark contrast to what was done to the Dann sisters and other Indigenous Peoples on Shoshone territory when they did the same thing on lands that were unquestionably their own.
It was 1973 when the federal government first told Mary and Carrie Dann that they were “trespassing on public land,” sparking a protracted paper war that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
In contrast, the Bureau of Land Management’s attempt to round up 400 of Bundy’s cattle was met with resistance from armed so-called patriots, and the BLM ended up giving them back.
This Oxfam documentary takes us back in time to when the federal government dragged these grandmothers forcibly off the land that their ancestors had inhabited for millennia and sold their cattle to fund grazing fees, using the same laws that Bundy is now flaunting.
