Stop Grifting on Stolen Land
This scene is at the major highway intersection near Roy, MT, population 108. Signs with this message have heavily peppered central Montana in the last few years. A post office box in Roy is listed as the home of upom.org, the United Property Owners of Montana, producer of the sign. You can buy your own "Save the Cowboy" yard sign for only $35 by sending a check to UPOM in Roy. UPOM is actually an astroturf public relations campaign managed by The Montana Group, a Helena-based political consulting firm of former Republican Party electeds and professional grifters. Over 225 miles away from Roy, they are not actually doing anything--besides selling yard signs--to effectively stop the American Prairie Foundation from establishing a 3-million acre reserve for bison on land that for several hundred years was the home of the Blackfeet. But the local ranchers don’t mind the grift. They are the current landowners (they are not "cowboys," who earn minimum wages for working the land for ranchers but almost never own the land that they work). Ranchers buy lots of signs to deflect attention from the truth, that their white ancestors stole the land that underlies their increasingly tenuous existence, made so by huge out-of-state "ag" corporations (like US Foods). It’s as though ranches are led to believe that “if the buffalo come, the Indians will follow.” Give the land back to the bison. Then repatriate the stolen land.
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Stop Grifting on Stolen Land
note taken by
Marshall Mayer
on September 9, 2021 at 11:25 AM
at the intersection of MT 19 and US 191 near Roy, MT USA
Image and text above Copyright © Marshall Mayer. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
