The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.84

The Dawes Severalty Act was an Indian Land in Severalty Bill touted by National Indian Land Reform Organizations as a needed reform of Federal Indian Land Policy of tribal communal ownership of tribal lands and treaty promises of tribal sovereignty. Montana Senator Walsh’s Blackfeet Allotment Bill was a reform of the 1790 Indian Trade and Non-Intercourse Act guaranteed by President George Washington, as the United States Indian Policy of separate lands for whites and Indians, and holding tribal lands in a federal trust for the accomplishment of a treaty purpose, which federal law prohibited state law and state emigrants in Indian Country. The border-whites would now rob the individual Blackfeet allotments as they could not force another tribal land cession of the 156,000 irrigated lands and oil fields they coveted.  

The 1896 Agreement/Article Five exempted the Blackfeet Indians from allotment except as they requested under tribal law and treaty provisions to apply to the agent for the title to lands improved by them, and allotments for their families. The Indians desired economic progress by developing a new tribal economy based on raising cattle and development of the tribal livestock industry upon the reserved tribal grazing tracts and water rights of the Blackfeet Indians. The border-whites could not break the power of the Blackfeet Chiefs to force tribal land cessions so long as the tribal lands were held in common except under genocidal conditions of mass tribal starvation that forced the 1887 Blackfeet land cession; agreed to only after 600 Indians starved to death. Embezzlements of $1.5 million of tribal land cession funds by the agency ring bankrupted the Indians, forcing the sale of the “mineral belt” for another $1.5 million which they in turn stole. Now they could and did coerce and defraud individual Indian land owners of their individual allotments by the Blackfeet Agent issuing illegal fee patents to the Indians.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.84