The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.87

The Blackfeet Indians have not yet learned the value of individual property as applied to land. It also seems true that very few, if any of the other Indians have learned the value of individual property for the reports are that not more than 10 per cent of those who get fee patents for their lands retain them. There are many paupers now because of this among Indians who have been allotted land and given patents without any preparation for such an ownership. We have therefore, protested in tribal organization against opening of any of our lands, or any part of our reservation, which should be held intact to protect the Indian people who have never known or understood the value of land beyond the occupation of it temporarily to meet their immediate needs, and being used to occupying any part of large tracts which have been owned in common. Our tribe will, if the existing law is carried into effect, be situated so as to sustain great and irreparable loss and injury. It is our desire to present plain and practicable objections to the Department of the Interior and Congress to the present law-the act of March 1, 1907.”

The Interior Department issued the first allotments in 1912 and allotted the entire reservation in a final allotment in 1919 leaving no “surplus lands” containing the irrigated lands and newly discovered oil fields to sell to the scheming border-whites. But, Senator Walsh then inserted language in the existing law in the Burke Act that would “make the Indian competent and issue him his final patent.” This provision would be used by the border-whites and agency ring to force hundreds of illiterate and incompetent Blackfeet Allottees to accept Patents-In-Fee which exposed their lands to state law and speculators, who robbed 293,000 acres by 1922.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau  
pg.87