Water is the last of the Blackfeet hopes for a good life in America

Mark Twain was invited to a dinner honoring Senator Clark of Montana in 1889 when Clark became the first United States Senator from the newly admitted State of Montana into the Union. He wrote, "This was the first time I had ever seen men get down in the gutter and frankly worship dollars and their possessors. I had never before heard men worship the dollar with their mouths, or seen them on their knees in the act. Clark of Montana is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment. By his example he has so excused and so sweetened corruption that in Montana, it no longer has an offensive smell." The State of Montana Legislature and the Congress of the United States had agreed as a condition of statehood, that state jurisdiction would not apply to Indian land or person; but Senator Clark sent up bills in Congress to rob the remaining Blackfeet treaty lands by starving the Indians into tribal land cessions until the Indians have little usable land left on the reservation due to encroachment by border-whites enabled by the likes of Senator Clark and the Governors of Montana, until all we, the Blackfeet Treaty Indians, have left is our clean waters, now under attack by another federal law passed by Congress is dragging free treaty Indians into Montana cattlemen's courts, judges, and juries to settle our water rights. The Government's plan for the Blackfeet Indians is the 1980 Bureau of Indian Affairs pipeline project to build water lines to "dry" Blackfeet land allotments checker-boarding void "wet" patent-in-fee lands of white men, who robbed water holes and water courses in the massive forced patents land frauds of hundreds of Blackfeet land allotments amounting to 529,000 acres. The Government plan would cost $50 million dollars to construct pipelines to Blackfeet cattle ranchers which would take 50 years to complete. Of course, we will all be dead by then. Is that the ultimate plan for the Indians?  Bob Juneau Sr.