A tribal nation-building policy is needed to energize reservation economies and create jobs for the 80% of Blackfeet Indians unemployed on the reservation. Tribal housing slums brought crime and drug abuse among the people and 80% unemployment rate caused juvenile diabetes epidemic among Blackfeet children. Iraq after Bush's bombing is in better shape than the Blackfeet Reservation who have been hit by an economic bombshell of poor and stupid policy from the federal government "professionals" who are bureaucrats that manage the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is the rogue federal agency created by Congress to control reservation economies and to control the Indian people by paternalistic policies that kill individual initiative to get out of poverty. Every time Indian landowners try to change the land leasing policies created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs their initiative is challenged by the white ranchers who lease individual Blackfeet lands from the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a pittance leaving the Indian landowners out of the profits from his own property. It is an Indian land leasing fraud that has gone on for over a century and is the policy that keeps the Blackfeet landowners in a perpetual state of poverty. The Blackfeet people still own 1.3 million acres of the reservation and have unresolved land fraud claims awaiting resolution by Congress since 1928. Tribal nation-building is more than providing health care and welfare which is itself inadequate and rationed out like a brick of government cheese. Federal Indian policy is needed that follows the special treaty rights that each tribe possesses from treaties signed to make way for the white man in America. The Blackfeet Tribe signed treaties that gave the United States a vast territory stretching from the Dakota border in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Canadian border in the north to the Yellowstone River in the south. The Blackfeet 1896 Agreement reserved the Blackfeet Reservation for the Indian cattle ranchers and the Blackfeet landowners for the purpose of rebuilding the tribal economy destroyed by the deliberate extermination of tribal buffalo herds which provided food, shelter and clothing for the tribe to survive the cold winters. The Blackfeet cattle ranchers had succeeded by 1893 in the new economy by building the self-reliant tribal cattle industry for 500 tribal ranchers, 25,000 cattle, improvements to the land for ranch houses, barns, gardens, root cellars fences, and small livestock, dairy, egg production, hay, and were shipping cattle to Chicago Stockyards, selling beef and hay to the government and everyone had cash and food! Today the cattle industry is destroyed by the federal government policy of leasing land to white ranchers for a tiny lease payment for the Indian landowners inadequate for even a subsistence on the ranch. Tribal housing slums were built in town and there the people starve and die early deaths. We are outdoor people who love our country much as the white Americans love their property. Today, because of the land frauds conducted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, we have "white treaty Indians" on our reservation, who robbed the best reservation lands and a billion dollars worth of oil, and are back to take our precious water because the white man has poisoned his own water and now needs our pure waters. We still own 1.3 million acres of prime grazing lands that produce upwards of $85 million for white ranchers living on the stolen Blackfeet lands in a white-apartheid territory called Glacier County transplanted by the State of Montana Legislature onto the Blackfeet Reservation to cover up the massive land frauds and to give the white man a void Patent-in-Fee title awarded in county court by a cattlemen judge and jury living up to the "Code of the West" which means no Indian has any rights in state courts or state laws. The Indians live in a political "Prisoner's Dilemma" having no recourse for justice.and add to this century old injustice the United States Government "complicity" in the Indian land frauds and the fact of a century of stonewalling our land claims in Congress. What chance do we have in American Justice? I brought our claims to Congress in 2001 but our chiefs made regular delegations of diplomatic missions to officially protest the white apartheid systems on our reservation since 1928. The land frauds were exposed for a century with no removals of a single white squatter from reservation lands. Is justice only for white men in America?
Bob Juneau Sr.
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