34 minute read
Understanding Cliven Bundy
Understanding Cliven Bundy: Using Narrative, Geographic, and Visual Empathy in Public Lands History
BY LEISL CARR CHILDERS
In April of 2014, Cliven Bundy’s story broke on the national news. For those unfamiliar with the Nevada rancher’s name, he is the patriarch of the Bundy family that featured prominently in the armed resistance against federal officials at Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014, and in the armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Federal law enforcement brought charges after these incidents against Bundy and several other members of his family, and they were tried in federal court where an Oregon jury acquitted them and a Nevada federal judge ruled a mistrial. Bundy and his family embody, though to a much greater degree than the norm, ongoing tensions between traditional users of public lands, such as ranchers, and federal land managers tasked with their care.
Several renowned journalists have written books and produced television shows and podcasts about the actions of Bundy and his family, including Frontline’s “American Patriot”; Leah Sotille’s Bundyville: Season 1; James Pogue’s Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West; John Temple’s Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America’s Patriot Militia Movement; Anthony McCann’s Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff; and Christopher Ketchum’s This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. Most of these are serious attempts to understand Bundy and his family’s perspective and offer some explanation of his actions. But all of these authors struggled to understand the Bundy family’s political and religious legal perspectives on public lands and their governance. They also offer, understandably, unsympathetic judgment of his actions and those of his family.
In the spring of 2014, before the release of any of these studies, I wrote a blog post that tried to make sense of Cliven Bundy and his family. Titled “Understanding Cliven Bundy,” the piece was an attempt to move past making Bundy into a symbol and an object used for political gain. I traced Bundy’s family history, his water rights and grazing history, and tried to offer some understanding of the situation from within his perspective. I concluded the article writing:
This was my attempt at seeing the issues that had brought ranchers and militia to Bunkerville from Bundy’s perspective and trying to understand the ranchers’ actions.
Among mainstream journalists and political commentators, there was much debate as to whether or not Bundy deserved any understanding at all. In fact, it became more and more difficult to comprehend his perspective as the events at Bunkerville led to the near-catastrophic crisis in Harney County. During the Oregon and Nevada trials of Bundy and his followers in 2017 and 2018, it became nearly impossible for me to even want to try. Bundy and his sons Ryan and Ammon grounded their actions in highly conservative articulations of faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ scripture and through their similarly conservative and faith-based interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. As the cases wore on, the family’s complaints about the federal government seemed to be well-founded when the defense uncovered an actual government conspiracy against the Bundy family. On the day the case in Nevada ended, Cliven, Ammon, and Ryan stood before media cameras and thanked God for their freedom and left the courthouse in Las Vegas believing their actions against the U.S. government were vindicated. 2
What exactly then is the point of trying to be empathetic? Is there even any value to expending time and energy trying to understand someone who has a perspective that is so different, so offensive? I argue that there is, especially in situations that call into question the way public lands are managed. My attempt to understand Cliven Bundy has become my own intensive case study in what it means to try to develop historical empathy. It was then and continues to be an exercise in working out how historical empathy is actually created. It has forced me to become more intentional in how I work with both the past and the present, and how I utilize narrative resources, geographic spaces, and visual materials to develop an understanding of very different perspectives.
Narrative, Geographic, and Visual Empathy
Empathy is a necessary component to understanding the past and is most often evoked in history, the study of the past, through some engagement with source analysis. The sources largely relied upon by historians, history educators, and history students alike consist of text, visual images, or a combination of the two, with perhaps some occasional auditory sources. Working with these materials typically produces information on people, places, times, and events, but rarely does routine source analysis evoke an understanding of the past that allows these researchers to inhabit the world view, the framework of thought, the way of seeing things from the historical actors’ perspectives. Even more rarely does it evoke an affective, or emotional, response.
The past is distant from the present in profound ways, and both intellectual and emotional responses to historical events are often hard to come by, especially when the past feels so unreachable except through these remnant, incomplete, and often frustrating sources. Nevertheless, it is important to do as Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist who has made a career out of studying historical thinking, suggests and avoid the faults of presentism, “the act of viewing the past through the lens of the present.” To Wineburg, “Judging past actors by present standards, wrests them from their own context and subjects them to ways of thinking that we, not they, have developed.” 3 Wineburg is suggesting that we endeavor to understand the ways in which the historical actors we study make decisions and frame their actions. Rather than agree or disagree with their choices (though we might), Wineburg pushes us to try on the mindsets of these actors and see the world from their point of view.
In Wineburg’s opinion, the best way to create comprehension of and connection to the past is through the development of historical empathy, the act of creating an understanding of past situations as experienced by those living at that time, as opposed to considering them from the perspective of the present. Wrapping our researcher’s mind around historical actors’ perspectives, their frameworks of thought requires more than just knowing the facts. Historical empathy, produced by engaged and careful analysis and contextualization of source materials, according to Wineburg, fosters the ability to “think in time.” 4
But thinking in time is not enough. In order to truly create historical empathy, those who study the past must also feel in time. A fundamental component of historical empathy is the term empathy itself. Defined by literary scholar Suzanne Keen, who has done extraordinary work integrating the psychology of empathy with the construction of narrative or story, empathy is “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect” that “can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading.” Empathy is not sympathy, sometimes called empathetic concern, but rather is a reasonable step that moves us from feeling or understanding what we believe others feel to feeling for or with them. 5
For Keen, empathy is created through narrative, within the act of storytelling. Her theory of narrative empathy posits that authors can create shared feeling and perspective for readers through literary techniques, commonly used by creative writers of nonfiction and novelists, such as the creation and articulation of characters with whom audiences can identify and the use of narrative situations—whether familiar, representative, or that emphasize common hopes or vulnerabilities—that can be shared across audiences. Similarly, readers are likely to connect to characters with whom they can identify and to situations with which they have some understanding. There is no guarantee that readers will understand and connect to a story at this deeper emotional level, but some connection does occur. 6 Within narrative empathy, authors create understanding in how they choose to tell stories and readers come to a place of understanding by engaging with that storytelling.
For novelists, creative writers, and historians alike, it matters how the story is told. For the readers of stories, historians included, it also matters how the story is read. But historians as a group must consider both ways in which stories are told and how they are read, particularly through the process of source analysis. Historical sources are really just story fragments. Besides the information they contain, they also provide perspective on a matter of interest—an event, an idea, another person— from a particular point of view. In addition to merely identifying the historical actor(s) involved, situating that point of view and explicating the narrative situation is the work of contextualization. Building the historical context around a source is fundamental to the source analysis process.
The cornerstone of a source’s narrative situation is its actual physical situation—both the location of the source (where the physical item resides and where its digital surrogate is preserved) and the location of the author and audience. Where historical actors live, how they live in that location, and how they move through that place are critical questions to explore. As much as empathy can be developed through narrative, it can also be fostered through geography. In her analysis of Victorian author Thomas Hardy’s novels, literary scholar Eve Sorum argues that the writer moved beyond the use of characters’ interior points of view and offered readers a common, connective geographic perspective that had been largely associated with the objective, scientific study of nature. 7 Observers of nature saw the places of their observation from different perspectives but came to common scientific understandings of those places despite their different points of view.
In Sorum’s estimation, Hardy used what she terms “geo-empathy: the possibility of empathy across difference,” understanding that is grounded, often literally, in the same physical space. She writes, “If empathy can be engaged by occupying the same spatial perspective, then differences in period, class, gender, or other social and personal divisors might be bridged.” Rather than blurring or transcending differences, because it is impossible to actually stand in another person’s shoes, let alone replicate the actual space and time once occupied by a historical actor, this geographically grounded form of empathy creates “a route to engagement with others.” 8 If we can physically occupy the same landscapes, literally stand on the same ground as the historical actors we study, we can use the geography itself as a common ground between ourselves and what is unfamiliar.
Building narrative and geographic forms of empathy within our analysis of historical sources enhances the creation of historical empathy. However, bringing those perspectives into focus and aligning what are often disparate points of view requires attention to a final component. The cultural framing of visual images, from paintings to prints, snapshots to staged photographs—what we often call visual culture—speaks volumes about both the author of the images and the audience to whom they are directed. In the absence of text, what is portrayed in the visual field is determined by and reflects an array of social values that constitute particular cultures. 9 That context can be interrogated in visual materials as much as it can in the case of textual sources. Noting what is in the field of view and what is not, elements that are centered in the image versus those on the periphery, the angle of the image itself, all of these are choices made by the image author. These choices evoke specific responses in audiences—an Ansel Adams photograph of a magnificent landscape in a national park, famously devoid of people, can generate joy in those who want to view nature as wild and without evidence of human presence.
Images provide audiences with common ground to view and reflect because they trim out everything except what the author wishes us to see, they eradicate the visual noise. Federal agencies use images of public lands that emphasize the beauty of these landscapes to attract interest and visitation. These images portray the scenery at its best and as a result, they are adept at creating engagement. They may also be able to create understanding between disparate groups. These landscapes are available to a variety of individuals, from visitors to nearby residents, who engage in a variety of different activities on public lands and who can literally see the landscape from the same perspective as the authors of the official photographs. Of these three forms of empathy building—narrative, geographic, and visual—visual empathy is best suited to begin connecting us through visual representation to perspectives and feelings not our own, particularly on public lands.
What would it look like if we built and utilized a visual empathy technique to create historical empathy in situations where the source material is challenging and the historical actors are relatively unsympathetic? What techniques can we develop to intentionally and deliberately make space in our historical practice to empathize with people from the past with whom we have nothing in common? How might we do this with regard to difficult situations in the present? In an age of wider and deeper division between the American body politic, reified by a national news media driven to sensationalize rather than contextualize events, this kind of empathetic practice fills the void by creating understanding out of discord. Instead of treating Cliven Bundy as an irrational actor, this practice takes his position seriously and attempts to understand his point of view. That is not the same as creating agreement or rationalizing his actions.
When I considered Cliven Bundy in my 2014 blog post, it was not enough for me to hear his words; it was necessary for me to try to see those words at play in the landscape he occupied. But at the time I wrote “Understanding Cliven Bundy,” I had only a loose sense of how to generate historical empathy in analyzing historical sources. What I lacked was an intentional process that could incorporate a familiar visual perspective, one that provided an accepted vision of a natural landscape, whether I was familiar with it or not, with an unfamiliar narrative, one that I had a hard time understanding and contextualizing. Combining the strange and uncomfortable statements made by Cliven Bundy, about his past and his home, with a familiarly framed image of the public lands, signaling their wild and pristine beauty, used by Bundy could push me to better understand Cliven Bundy’s point of view.
Artist Mary P. Donahue offered me an insight into how a Bundy’s story might physically become manifest in the landscape they occupied. I saw Donahue present some of her work and discuss her artistic process at the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society Symposium in the fall of 2018. Donahue’s paintings are of landscapes that carry echoes of the past. They grapple with the gigantic spaces of the Colorado Plateau, the northern Rocky Mountains, and the Great Plains. They emphasize what she described as “nature stripped bare,” such as erosion formations, dead trees, remnants of physical features that were once seamless or whole. Her work features only small touches of human artifice, but their configuration in the paintings somehow implies large human impacts. She sometimes embeds words in her landscapes, descriptions, and stories that serve to change audiences’ view of that place. She writes these statements along the ground, over rocks and hills, or places them in the sky above. Her technique suggested a way to challenge the preconceived visions we have of public lands proliferated through the array of gorgeous landscape images we all strive to take by imbuing those very scenes with the specificity of human experience that is different from our own.
Intentionally juxtaposing a divergent perspective against a familiarly framed place to generate visual empathy provides a springboard for cultivating greater historical empathy. I had attempted to do this with Bundy’s story, by taking his claims about his past and his family’s past seriously and through exploration of the geography of the Virgin River valley where he ranged cattle, but could not fully achieve the understanding I desired. Placing his perspective within a framing of that landscape that was more familiar is the next step. To test this process, what follows then is an experiment. Below are three public lands ranchers’ stories, three public lands places and images that depict their beauty, three controversies, and three discussions that illustrate the practice of configuring visual empathy and creating historical empathy.
Basin and Range National Monument and Gracian Uhalde
On July 10, 2015, President Barack Obama signed a proclamation designating the Basin and Range National Monument in Nevada. The proclamation declared:
That is certainly what Bureau of Land Management photographer Bob Wick captures in the first image. Wick, a twenty-five-year BLM employee, is a self-trained photographer who works as the wilderness and wild and scenic rivers program lead in the agency’s California state office. His images are brilliantly done in the tradition of famed wildlands photographer Ansel Adams. Playing on light and shadow, meticulously crafted to reveal the natural beauty of a place with little to no human presence or evidence of human occupation, his rich images portray public lands as desirable places to visit. The BLM has lauded his photographs, noting how they “provide an immediate understanding of the importance of public lands.” 11
Bureau of Land Management photographer Bob Wick captured this view of the Basin and Range National Monument, Nevada, on August 30, 2015. Gracian Uhalde’s sentiments on the bottom image, as written in by Leisl Carr Childers, blends image and text to evoke the perspective of locals in the area.
Wick’s perspective is that of a caretaker of public lands and a wilderness advocate. His images of Basin and Range National Monument focus on the vast open spaces created by the basin and range geology, the petroglyphs left behind by Indigenous ancestors, and recreationists enjoying the scenic beauty and cultural wonders of the place. 12 This particular image faces the viewer west and centers on a long dirt road that leads nowhere. Flanked by sagebrush and other high desert vegetation, it rolls down the valley, called Garden Valley, towards the dry playa and then is gone. The road disappears in the center of the image and lightly reappears only as it exits the frame in the center right. Framed this way, the road serves as an arrow that points to the mountains, the Quinn Canyon Range, administered as part of the Humboldt National Forest. There is no evidence of any human intervention save the road that leads to some distant place outside of the frame.
That road, however, actually does go somewhere. In the Quinn Canyon Range, there are a handful of residences, several of which are base properties for nearby ranching operations. One of those operations belongs to the Uhalde family, who run cattle and sheep during the winter on public lands allotments in Garden Valley that have been included in Basin and Range National Monument. The Uhalde family, descendant from Basque immigrants, has been ranching in the Ely area since the late nineteenth century and expanded their winter range south in the 1960s under the Homestead Act. Their ranching operation is anchored by a small property at Adaven up Cherry Creek Canyon and by an array of water rights around Garden Valley. 13 The presidential proclamation that designated the monument acknowledged the ranching history of the area, and subsequent planning reports have grappled with “the ranching lifestyle” as a designated monument value, anticipating that “livestock grazing will continue into the future.” 14 At the signing ceremony, members of the Uhalde family were present, a tacit nod to their support of the monument. 15
Seen from the Uhaldes’ perspective, the monument looks different than Wick’s portrayal. Commenting on the insecure future of his ranching operation, Gracian N. Uhalde argued: “Because, well, I think we’re at a crossroads where, you know, this way of life, I guess I see it fading out, to a certain extent. I think if you want to and you’re hungry enough to hang onto it, there may be a chance, but the world changes so fast and things are, you know, it seems like it’s a world of eighteen hours instead of twenty-four to make a revolution nowadays. It really does. So I think it’s better you can prepare your kids for whatever event comes along.” 16 The monument designation was his way of grappling with the changing landscape of public lands management. 17 It was also a way for him to write his ranch back into the landscape.
What then do Wick’s photographs of Basin and Range National Monument obfuscate? What happens when we write Uhalde’s story onto Wick’s images? How does this help us see Wick? Uhalde? The management of the national monument itself? Wick’s vision of the landscape that comprises the monument is that of wilderness, one that captures the magnificence of the scale of mountains and depth of the valley, but that minimizes an active human presence. The road to Wick is centered, but not meaningful. Uhalde’s vision of the landscape within the monument is that of home and livelihood; he sees forage and fence lines, water tanks and pipes, and he looks for where his livestock are settled for the day. To him the road is a throughway, a connection to home. When Wick turns his camera to Garden Valley, he erases the presence of people like Uhalde. However, they both see the same high mountains and dry playa, and chances are, they both revel in the open spaces and natural beauty of the place.
The Checkerboard and Carrie Dann
In northern Nevada, both north and south of Interstate 80 where it parallels the Central Pacific Railroad and the Humboldt River, the land tenure alternates in square mile sections between railroad land grants and public lands. Known as the Checkerboard, this area has posed the state and the Bureau of Land Management significant difficulties. The BLM leases much of this land to ranchers for grazing purposes, but for the leases to work, the ranchers have had to coordinate with the railroad company or its property management proxy to lease the alternating sections. Some of the railroad sections have been purchased by private developers, and some of the BLM sections have been homesteaded, creating pockets of private land that also have to be navigated. But it is nearly impossible to differentiate the different sections just by looking at the landscape and almost as difficult to do so through property surveys.
Jhulea Marie Hill and Dakota Brice Malmrose of Flint, Michigan, according to the Eureka County Assessor’s Office, are the owners of a little over nine acres in Crescent Valley, Nevada, in the Checkerboard just south of I-80. The parcel number 003–187–03, listed as Nevelos 1–19 and given the street address 370 Fourth Street in the Nevelco, Inc. Unit 1 subdivision, is about three miles southeast of the small unincorporated town of Crescent Valley along State Highway 306. There are no buildings on the property, nor any buildings on the surrounding properties. Although not currently for sale, the property is listed on several online real estate sales platforms and has been sold five times in the last decade. The second photograph, taken by an unknown photographer to showcase the property’s viewshed appeal in sales listings, looks south and east towards the Cortez Mountains. It is one of nine images that were meant to appeal to potential buyers when the property sold in 2017. 18
This particular image was the most scenic, classically framed by the photographer, with the bottom half of the photograph featuring a flat, sagebrush-covered plain and the upper half divided between soaring snow-capped mountains and a brooding cloud-covered sky. One can imagine how a backyard with a deck would capture this view in a profound way. And because the property is part of the Checkerboard, that view is largely of open public land. There is no indication that anyone lives between where this property sits and the mountains. There is no evidence of a road, only a dry playa in the center left of the photograph. There is also no evidence of water resources that might serve the future residents of this property. The property listing indicates that a well or tank must be installed in order for water to be made available.
View in Crescent Valley, Eureka County, Nevada, from a parcel known as Nevelco 1–19, circa 2015. The perspective of Carrie Dann, a Western Shoshone with ancestral ties to the Crescent Valley, is written on the photo by Leisl Carr Childers.
Despite the lack of visible roads and available water in the image, there are quite a few dirt roads that crisscross Crescent Valley and a number of springs, streams, and wells controlled by ranchers in the region. One of the most important ranch operations in the history of Crescent Valley has been the Dann Ranch, homesteaded under the 1862 law in the 1920s, anchored by water resources comprised of running creeks and several wells, and utilizing the Checkerboard to graze livestock on public lands. 19 Like the Uhaldes, the Dann family has been operating their ranch, raising cattle and horses, throughout the twentieth century for multiple generations. But the Danns are Western Shoshone, part of a vast network of Indigenous peoples who occupy Nevada and other interior western states in a region sometimes called the Great Basin. Their interests parallel those of the Uhaldes, but with one important difference. The Danns have viewed Crescent Valley as part of their ancestral homeland, Newe Sogobia, and claim aboriginal title to that land. 20
Seen from the Danns’ perspective, although this second photograph does convey a view grounded in the idea of home, it is a vastly different depiction of home. Rather than an image of potential home, it is a vision of ancestral home. Speaking to the difficulty and importance of maintaining possession of their home, Carrie Dann commented, “My struggle has been, you know, to make some kind of a livelihood for, for myself my family and of course you know our people. . . . But here we used to survive on whatever is out there on the land. Today, we don’t have that out there on the land. . . . And as indigenous peoples, the most important thing is our future generations. Our grandmother used to tell us, ‘This land don’t belong to you, it belongs to the future.’” 21
How does this image of a lucrative real estate parcel change in light of Dann’s words? What assumptions lie behind the concept of this property and of its adjacent public lands? What is being erased in this photograph? The Nevelos 1–19 property is owned, according to the county assessor’s office, by a couple of residents of Michigan. But Dann’s perspective is that land belongs only to future generations. Are Hill and Malmrose good caretakers? Do they appreciate, utilize, or enjoy these lands? Or are these acres merely dollars on a deed they hope will appreciate over time? The Dann family fought for decades in the late twentieth century to force the BLM to give them proper consideration on public lands grazing allotments. They litigated against the federal government to secure Indigenous title over Crescent Valley and the rest of Newe Sogobia. Can Hill and Malmrose, or for that matter any of us, even see that in this photograph, or is that truth entirely hidden in the framing of the image? The overlay of Carrie Dann’s words on the image of the Nevelos 1–19 property convicts us of our ignorance of the Dann family’s deep and abiding connection to this place.
Gold Butte National Monument and Cliven Bundy
Gold Butte National Monument was the last monument created by the exiting Obama administration on December 28, 2016. Highly controversial, the designation divided local interests in Clark County, Nevada, between those who supported expanding natural areas around the Las Vegas valley and those who saw the monument designation as an impediment to future development. According to its proclamation, the monument features
Bob Wick, the well-known BLM photographer, photographed the Gold Butte area only months before the monument designation occurred. In keeping with his pattern of framing images of natural spaces with an eye towards capturing the natural beauty of the place, Wick turned his lens on the petroglyphs and deeply colored sandstone that makes the monument spectacular. Taken of one of the primary rock formations, this final image captures the interplay of evening light and shadow across the landscape. The framing of gently sloping creosote-covered desert and emerging red and gold sandstone below a cloud-strewn sky provides a sense of the vast desert the monument encompasses. The focus of the camera capturing the hint of a dirt road curving between and beyond the sandstone formations provides the only clue to how this remote place might be accessed. 23
Wick’s view of Gold Butte National Monument stands in direct contrast to that of the Bundy family, whose cattle still roam the region. The monument designation talked about remnants of a ranching past, but the Bundys insisted upon continuing to ranch in the present. The Bureau of Land Management had permitted the Bundys to run cattle on a grazing allotment now encompassed by the national monument throughout the late twentieth century. The story of the demise of the Bundys’ cattle ranch has centered on the refusal of Cliven Bundy to pay the necessary grazing fees to the BLM since 1993 and the family patriarch’s strange, religiously devout, sovereign citizen-like ideology. The events at Bunkerville in 2014 were actually the culmination of a transformation in land management that put the family in the middle of BLM and Clark County negotiations for: consolidation of public lands into areas earmarked for development and those set aside to protect the endangered desert tortoise and its habitat; the BLM increasing restrictions on and fees for a severely decreased number of grazing permits; and the emerging pressure on individually held water resources from both the behemoth Southern Nevada Water Authority in the Las Vegas valley and the emerging Virgin Valley Water District to the north in Mesquite. 24
Bob Wick’s photograph of Gold Butte National Monument in southeastern Nevada, September 27, 2016, with the perspective of Cliven Bundy written in by Leisl Carr Childers.
Also missing from Wick’s framing of Gold Butte National Monument are the ways in which the Bundys are able to maintain their cattle on the national monument despite the closure of the grazing allotment and the perpetual state of trespass of the family’s cattle. Cliven Bundy still holds significant water rights on the monument at various springs, including near the site of where Wick took his photograph. 25 Bundy has an emphatic view of his rights to the land that once comprised the BLM’s Bunkerville Allotment and that now comprises the monument. He argues: “And when that horse takes the very first sip of that renewable resource, he is beginning to create a beneficial use of that resource. And from that point on, he is the first white man basically to create a beneficial use for man and when that horse takes that drink and so he’s first come, first served, I think. So he has created the first beneficial use of that resource. Renewable resource. . . . That’s how our rights are created.” 26
What does this change in Wick’s depiction of Gold Butte National Monument? How should we grapple with the discrepancy between his vision of this place and that of the Bundys? How do these rights square with those of visitors to the monument, those who might interact with the cattle and the water? Any disagreement with the Bundys’ position does not change their relationship to these water rights; they are embedded in the disposition of the landscape even more, perhaps, than the monument designation. It is this relationship that allows the family’s cattle to continue to be present in the monument despite the closure of the grazing allotment. As long as the cattle have access to those water sources they will remain in the area. But even during the period in which Bundy held valid grazing permits and paid the grazing fees, his water rights gave him priority on the Bunkerville Allotment. Although grazing permits are not directly tied to water rights, they are impossible to secure because permittees have to demonstrate that the livestock being permitted have access to adequate water. Cliven Bundy’s belief in his right to use the land that is now a national monument because of the water rights he holds on that land is well-founded because of this configuration. Whether we want to believe it or not, the Bundy’s have legitimate concerns with how their rights have been abrogated.
Coming to Grips with Empathy
The cornerstone of historical empathy is understanding, not agreement. Although it is far easier to understand people with whom we personally agree or narratives that we relate to, the historian is tasked with understanding the multiple perspectives that make up any situation. Neither is agreement the task of public lands management. But understanding is, or at least it should be.
Getting at that understanding can be difficult. Narrative can only take us so far into the realm of empathy. Beyond written stories, landscapes can be entry points into and common grounds for understanding other particularly different or divergent perspectives by creating geo-empathy. However, for many of us including myself, it is better to see the landscape in a familiar way and to see the words depicting unfamiliar perspectives within that landscape. That is the realm of visual empathy. In putting images framed in a familiar way together with unfamiliar perspectives, we challenge the preconceived perceptions we bring to bear in both source analysis and in how we perceive our public lands. Bob Wick’s photographs of the two newest national monuments in Nevada and the image by an unknown photographer portraying a potential home property provide familiar entry points into places we may or may not have seen ourselves. These images communicate the grandeur of seemingly empty, wide-open spaces. They glory in the natural beauty of the places they capture. Integrating the perspectives of the Uhaldes, Danns, and Bundys into these landscapes, and overlaying their words onto that familiar wildland framing, offers necessary insight into how these families navigate and perceive these places differently. For Gracian Uhalde, the lands that comprise Basin and Range National Monument have offered him a sense of security because they include his ranching operation. For Carrie Dann, the Nevelos 1–19 property erases her connection to the long legacy of her ancestors on that land. And for Cliven Bundy, the lands that have become Gold Butte National Monument represent his detachment from valid water rights granted him by the state.
Because all of these places consist, at least for the most part, of public lands, visual empathy also offers a way to ameliorate the difficulty of understanding the different perspectives that those who use public lands take. Juxtaposing the framing and position of the photographer and their image, and the alternate, if not oppositional, narrative position of the historical actor can lead us to a better understanding of both. It pushes us to question what the creator of the image leaves out that is important to the narrator, to see the type of emphasis the narrator places on public lands, and to grapple with our own conceptualization of whose lands these really have been and continue to be.
Notes
1 Leisl Carr Childers, “Understanding Cliven Bundy,” BlogWest (blog), April 21, 2014, https://blogwest.org /2014/04/21/understanding-cliven-bundy/. Emphasis added.
2 Tay Wiles, “How the Feds Helped Make Cliven Bundy a Celebrity,” High Country News, April 30, 2018, https://www .hcn.org/issues/50.7/sagebrush-rebellion-celebrity -scofflaw.
3 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 90.
4 Carr Childers, “Understanding Cliven Bundy.”
5 Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–5.
6 Keen, 93–98. Emphasis added.
7 Eve C. Sorum, Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 30. Emphasis in the original.
8 Sorum, 30–31.
9 Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 56–58.
10 “Proclamation 9297—Establishment of the Basin and Range National Monument,” July 10, 2015, https://www .govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-201500486/pdf /DCPD-201500486.pdf.
11 “Introducing Guest Photo Editor Bob Wick!,” My Public Lands, https://mypubliclands.tumblr.com/post /57165462352/introducing-guest-photo-editor-bob -wick-as-our-my.
12 Bureau of Land Management, Basin and Range National Monument Album, Flickr, accessed January 15, 2020, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mypubliclands /albums/72157655302466798.
13 Leisl Carr Childers, The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 5, 161–62.
14 “Analysis of the Management Situation,” Bureau of Land Management, December 15, 2017, 81, https://eplanning .blm.gov/epl-front-office/projects/lup/63341/130728 /159524/BARNM_AMS_2017-12-21.pdf.
15 Steve Tetrault, “Obama Signs Proclamation Creating Nevada National Monument,” Las Vegas Review- Journal, July 10, 2015, https://www.reviewjournal .com/local/local-nevada/obama-signs-proclamation -creating-nevada-national-monument/.
16 Gracian N. Uhalde, partially quoted in Carr Childers, The Size of the Risk, 14. Full quote in Uhalde, interview with Leisl Carr Childers, December 1, 2006, 42, in author’s possession. Emphasis added.
17 Carr Childers, The Size of the Risk, 14 and 218.
18 Crescent Valley Nevelos 1–19 (T29N, R48, Sec. 15, Lot 19) LandAndFarm.com, https://www.landandfarm.com /property/Crescent_Valley_Nevelos_1_19-2858073/.
19 General Land Office Record 1018825, August 30, 1928; Nevada State Water Right certificates 2360 and 2361 (January 22, 1938), 4832 (December 10, 1958), 5553 (June 13, 1963), 9151 (December 27, 1978), 10376 (October 26, 1982), and 12653 (February 1, 1991).
20 Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 170–73.
21 Carrie Dann, interview with Samantha Senda-Cook, August 19, 2009, 7, 18, Everett L. Cooley Oral History Project, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=800843; Carrie Dann, interview with Norm Cavanaugh, July 17, 2008, 7, Great Basin Indian Archives, https://www .gbcnv.edu/gbia/manuscripts/oral_histories/GBIA019 _CarrieDann_07172008.pdf. Emphasis added.
22 “Proclamation 9559—Establishment of the Gold Butte National Monument,” December 28, 2016, https:// www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-201600876/pdf /DCPD-201600876.pdf.
23 Bureau of Land Management, Gold Butte National Monument Album, Flickr, accessed January 15, 2020, https:// www.flickr.com/photos/mypubliclands/albums /72157676771118551. Although Bob Wick is not listed as the creator of the images in this album, the digital identifier of the Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera (72157622292089908) used to create the images of Gold Butte National Monument matches that of the same camera used by Bob Wick to create other images for the BLM in Utah. See Bureau of Land Management—Utah, Bob Wick Photography Album, Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/blmutah/albums /72157667127260909.
24 Jamie Fuller, “Everything You Need to Know about the Long Fight between Cliven Bundy and the Federal Government,” Washington Post, April 15, 2014, and reposted January 4, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost .com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/15/everything-you -need-to-know-about-the-long-fight-between-cliven -bundy-and-the-federal-government/; Leah Sottile, “Bundyville Chapter 3: A Clan Not to Cross,” Bundyville Podcast, May 2018, https://longreads.com/2018 /05/17/bundyville-chapter-three-a-clan-not-to-cross/; John Temple, Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America’s Patriot Militia Movement (Dallas, TX: Ben Bella Books, 2019), 39–66.
25 Nevada State Water Right vested rights V08974- V08984, October 21, 1997.
26 Cliven Bundy, interview with Cliven, Ryan, and Carol Bundy, March 4, 2015, quoted in Betsy Gaines Quammen, “American Zion: Mormon Perspectives on Landscape from Zion National Park to the Bundy Family War” (PhD diss., Montana State University, 2017), 240, https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy2.library.colo state.edu/docview/1910864226?accountid=10223.
