BLACKFEET INDEPENDENCE DAY-SEPTEMBER 26, 1895!

BLACKFEET INDEPENDENCE DAY-SEPTEMBER 26, 1895! The Blackfeet Indians have been loyal treaty-partners of the United States since signing the 1855 Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Amity, allowing American settlers to cross Blackfoot Confederacy lands to Oregon Territory. The treaty included a provision to protect the Blackfeet Indians from "Depredations of white men, living in or crossing their country, may commit." This was an important issue for the Indians as their country was filling up with thousands of settlers encroaching on Blackfeet treaty lands, most of whom were killing Indians on sight including women, children, and elders. By 1863 Blackfoot lands were filled with 30,000 refugees from the Civil War, captured confederate soldiers who told Blackfeet Agent George B. Wright they "did not hold with the treaty" nor "care for U.S. law." By 1890 after the buffalo were destroyed there were only 1,811 Blackfeet Indians left alive from a tribal population of 7,800 in 1860 when confederates encroached on Blackfeet Treaty lands. The 1896 Agreement guaranteed the support of the United States to protect the self-reliant Blackfeet cattle industry developed by the Blackfeet cattle ranchers. Inspector C.C. Duncan reported in 1896 that "This is purely a grazing country, one of the best sections in the west to fatten cattle, during the present year they were enabled to put on the Government contract 1/2 million pounds of beef, shipped 600 hundred head to Chicago, and own near 25,000 cattle, live in houses, sell hay, have a sufficiency of implements, and fenced their ranch properties, and are on a self-supporting basis." George Bird Grinnell wrote the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1904, "A few years ago these Indians accumulated 25,000 cattle. Shortly before the removal of Agent Steell he took steps to scatter the Indians cattle, and they will be found with the expiration of $1.5 million of land cession funds with nothing to show for all the money they received except a few cattle and agency buildings." Inspector Gould reported the Blackfeet were worse off than convicts with a corrupt warden, "but these Indians are not felons either. Their case is hard. The short years during which Congress has provided ample means are fast passing. They know it. They feel they are not sliding but being pushed toward a pit of helplessness. Their revenues are stolen, their rights are insolently disregarded, and even their feelings are needlessly wronged, and Secretary [of the Interior] Vilas is personally responsible for this corruption and misrule." Next on the list were the private property of the Blackfeet landowners, the subject of the current unresolved Blackfeet land frauds, the forced fee patents conspiracy which robbed my grandma's land and hundreds of thousands of other Indian  lands across the United States. The Cobell Settlement checks came today, $851 for 160 years of stealing money from grandma's trust money accounts by federal employees. I want my land back, and I want justice for the 17,000 Indian claims trashed by President Reagan. Bob Juneau, Blackfeet patriot