Ammon Bundy claimed that all the land in the refuge once belonged to private ranchers and that the federal government acquired it illegally. Actually, in the nineteenth century, violent and armed white settlers and the federal government seized the land from the Indigenous Northern Paiute Nation, for whom the land was sacred. The federal government forcibly relocated the Paiutes when they resisted settler encroachment. Their residency dates back fourteen thousand years as part of the larger Paiute Nation of the intermountain area.
