A Tribute to Shawna Cox
In Recognition of her Unyielding Fight for Local Independence on the Frontlines of the American West
Happy 70th, Shawna Cox Today, Shawna Cox turns 70, and it's worth taking a moment to look at the life behind that number.
Long before she became a national figure, Shawna was putting her convictions to work at home in Kanab, Utah.
As a local Tea Party leader, she took a direct stand against federal land control in 2009 by organizing an ATV protest ride through Paria Canyon in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to dispute federal closures of local routes.
I first met Shawna on the Bundy Ranch in 2014, in the thick of the protest that put the fight over federal land control back in the national spotlight.
My 2014 Interview with Shawna at the Bundy Ranch
https://youtu.be/CSRrGAFofCw?is=GrdNPFh-ydDbHzmJ
She'd already spent years standing with ranchers who'd had enough of the BLM squeezing them off land their families had worked for generations — including Mary Bulloch, who ranged cattle on the 50 Mile in Escalante, Utah, and whose cattle were seized by the BLM and nearly sold at auction before a group of ranchers and supporters showed up on November 7, 2000, and got them back at the auction house in Salina, Utah.
In 2016, Shawna was up at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, and she was there in the truck the day LaVoy Finicum was gunned down.
She stood trial for her part the occupation and was acquitted. I was with her again in 2017/18, this time at the federal courthouse in Las Vegas for the Bundy Ranch trial.
Since then, our friendship has kept going — visits in 2025, and again this year, most recently with Ron Miller in Colorado City this past June.
Shawna's spent her life in the fight for the western way of life — for ranchers, for land, for the people the federal government too often forgets are still out there working it.
She's a dear friend, and somebody I admire a great deal.
Happy B-Day, Shawna. Here's to seventy years, and to the fight you're still not done with.
— Vincent Easley II
https://reallibertymedia.com/author/https-reallibertymedia-com-author-vine