WHAT DO THE BLACKFEET PEOPLE WANT TO DO WITH THEIR LAND AND WATER?

The border towns of Cut Bank, Valier, Conrad through their Commercial Clubs campaigned in 1913 to force the sale of 156,000 acres of Blackfeet irrigated farm lands and oil fields by starving over 100 Blackfeet Indians to death in the winter of 1913 while the tribal council was trying to get word to Washington that the Blackfeet people were in dire need of food, clothing and shelter. The Great Northern Railway owner James J. Hill had already robbed the Blackfeet of land and timber and was paid $25,000 from tribal funds to build the Blackfeet Highway from East Glacier to St. Mary Village, Now he was taking the oil fields and tourist trade from the Indians while the big meat trust Swift & Armor robbed the Indians land allotments through their subsidiary the Portland Land & Cattle Company. The agent and county government officials combined to issue fee patents which were robbed by white men by the hundreds and Joe Sherburne conspired to bankrupt the Indians of 25,000 head of cattle industry, and rob the "big-grass country" of the Blackfeet Reservation. Hundreds of Indians lost their lands and were broke and landless after being prosperous cattle ranchers in 1890. It was rumored that the senate investigator was killed by Chicago crime boss Al Capone, who had a phony bank in Browning which loaned money to Indians and foreclosed on their cattle herds before they could ship them to market. Every swindler headed to Browning on a "dog-trot", as Mrs. Monroe had said about sheep companies getting ten cent leases. The other ruse of the whites was to influence the federal reclamation service to build large reclamation projects that irrigated Blackfeet lands and transported tribal waters to downstream water users; all done at the expense of the Indians when Charles Davis, Supervisor of Farming for the Indian Bureau reported that after the expenditure of $900,552.26 of tribal land cession funds there was not a single acre of Blackfeet land under cultivation. Chairman Wolf Tail summed up the Government Indian Policy on the Blackfeet Reservation Economy: "The major service the government could perform is to put a stop to the useless expenditures of thousands upon thousands of dollars of our money on the construction by the Reclamation Service of irrigating canals, etc. in the endeavor to make farmers out of a people who have no desire or inclination to become such, who are not fitted for it by nature and who were never consulted about their wishes in the matter, but have always been treated by the government as children, and who had well-defined ideas as to what they wanted or what was good for them." Excerpts from the Sacred Buffalo Vision available on Amazon.Com , Sincerely, Bob Juneau Sr.