Leisl Carr Childers: Understanding Cliven Bundy & Utah Public Lands (Utah Historical Quarterly) (Season 2, Ep. 2 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome. This is Brad Westwood, and you're listening to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is the second show of our second season. I hope you'll go back and listen to our first season shows. This is a podcast about Utah history produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. My job as Senior Public Historian is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah as accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, we hope this is the place. My guest today is Dr. Leisl Carr Childers. Hello, Leisel.
Dr. Carr Childers is the Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on environmental history and the management of US public lands. Her research and writing has been featured on the podcast Bundyville and the PBS Frontline. Her first book, The Size of the Risk, Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin, won the Western Writers of America's Spur Award for contemporary non-fiction in 2016 We'll include that title in our show notes, hoping that that and other sources we might mention will be useful to you.
Today's show centers around Dr. Carr Childers' spring 2020 Utah Historical Quarterly article, Understanding Cliven Bundy, Using Narrative, Geographic and Visual Empathy in Public Land History. In this article, Leisel picks a very polarizing figure, Cliven Bundy, and his Bunkerville, Nevada ranch and family as a case study in exploring and developing historical empathy.
First of all, Leisel, thank you so much for being here. I sure appreciate your company.

**Leisl Carr Childers** (2:10)
You're welcome, Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (2:14)
This is a subject not only of interest for us as we understand public lands, but maybe even for us today in the life and the age we live in. Leisel, in your UHQ article, you work with a very interesting figure, Cliven Bundy, and I quote, it forced me as a historian to be more intentional in how I work with both the past and the present.
As we introduce our subject today, will you explain what you mean?

**Leisl Carr Childers** (2:46)
Sure, Brad, and thanks for having me. I think this is a wonderful opportunity to go a little deeper with some of the techniques that historians use to make sense of what goes on in the past.

**Brad Westwood** (2:59)
Absolutely.

**Leisl Carr Childers** (3:00)
I found Cliven Bundy to be particularly challenging as someone who both worked as a historical actor in the 70s and 80s, and even through the 90s, and then showed up on the national news in 2014 And what I found challenging about him and his way of operating in the world is it was really hard for me to understand, not just what he was doing, but how he was describing what he was doing. It just didn't seem to jive with the world as I understood it.
But I didn't think that he was crazy. I mean, I think the national news portrayed him as being a little bit out of his mind and maybe a bit of a dog and pony show. I particularly was resentful of the way Sean Hannity portrayed him. But there were plenty of others. And so I was puzzling out how am I supposed to understand him? How am I supposed to hear his words and understand his actions? Because my operating assumption was he seems like he's a decent fellow, largely. And I think most human beings are decent fellows. So maybe that's sort of a tacit assumption I make when dealing with people.
But I couldn't understand where he was coming from. So this was an effort for me to try to do a little bit better with understanding his perspective.

**Brad Westwood** (4:27)
So often history is something that's covered that has some years behind us.
Often we hear historians describe things or the concept of, well, you better wait 50 years or better before you address this. This is relatively contemporary history. I mean, you're talking about sources that are still active in their environments.
Tell me about what got you to this point where you wanted to address this kind of history. I mean, there's so much about public lands, the public domain and all the vast acreage of land and 66 percent or more of it is public land in Utah. So it's a big part of Utah's history. But how did you get there? What got you to that point where you wanted to address these subjects?

**Leisl Carr Childers** (5:24)
I think some of this was just good timing.
I was coming off the heels of a really big research project that I did for my dissertation to get my doctorate. And I was busy converting that dissertation, which the running joke amongst my cohort at University of Nevada Las Vegas, where I did my doctoral work, is that my dissertation was 610 pages long. My advisor, David Rebell, printed it out, plunked it down on a table, and said, well, here's the fun book. Because it was a very detailed study. So the book couldn't be that. It couldn't be functional in that way. It had to be more narrative driven. So I had gone back through everything, every last little detail.