January 16, 2016 07:01 AM UTC

Malheur Yeehawdists Aim to Give Grand Junction Back to Mexico

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• by: PKolbenschlag

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

NEW NORTH MEXICO – Hooboy.  #YallQaeda spokesman reveals intent of bird refuge occupiers.

The Oregonian is reporting:

BURNS – Protesters holding the bird sanctuary southeast of here want every county in the U.S. to start a process giving back federal land to the previous owners.

They expect that process to start in Harney County with a citizens group processing deeds, according to Ryan Payne, a self-styled militiaman and a key leader of the refuge occupation that started two weeks ago.

In an interview, Payne provided the most clear statement yet about what the occupiers want to achieve. They now call themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom.

The public lands in western Colorado and New Mexico, a corner of Wyoming, and all of Utah, California and Nevada–prior to being part of the “federal estate” (or shrinking treaty lands) within the United States–were part of Mexico. As I wrote in another diary about the lands in the North Fork Valley, Colorado:

Where I sit today, along the arroyos that sweep down from the flanks of the Grand Mesa, maybe right atop where Friar Dominguez stood to look at the plain of the North Fork of the Gunnison 80 years before my forebear marched against Santa Anna, and when the valley was still claimed by Spain; this was all part of  Mexico, and ceded at the point of a bayonet in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.

Of course the land only ‘belonged’ to Spain and then Mexico in the sense that they claimed it, their explorers and traders and trappers passed through most certainly on occasion, as had the Spanish friars in 1776, not too far from what became one leg of the Old Spanish Trail.

And other people already lived here too.  The Spaniards did not discover it. Indeed in western Colorado, and right here in the North Fork, people have made their home for 12,000 years or more.

This means that if the Bundy Boys are successful and avoid an extended stay in Florence, they may be surprised when they get back home to find their overseer is no longer a federal employee but a Federale.

Meanwhile, someone better contact Sen. Ray Scott and the Mesa County Commission. As much as both like to kvetch about the burdens of having to protect our shared public lands, clean air, and water supplies they might want to start brushing up on their Spanglish.

Then they can more effectively complain to Mexico City.