Tribal sovereignty means that the void patent-in-fee land titles of white men issued by Glacier and Pondera Courts are not worth the paper they are written on; nor do fee land certificates issued by the Secretary of the Interior and General Land Office of the United States sever Blackfeet Trust Land Titles on the Blackfeet Reservation. The Blackfeet Tribe must have the approval of two-thirds of the adult males petitioning the President to go under the laws of the State of Montana. The Organic Act of the Territory of Montana and the Enabling Act of the State of Montana each carry disclaimers to jurisdiction over the Blackfeet Indians, and the Montana Constitution disclaims any right or title to Indian lands. How did the white man get on the Blackfeet Reservation? The "Forced Fee Patents Cases on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation" are massive land frauds committed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Glacier and Pondera County Attorneys, corporations and border-white men to defraud hundreds of Blackfeet landowners of their trust land allotments. The white men also stole 25,000 cattle from Blackfeet ranchers, hay meadows, water holes, river courses, St. Mary and Milk Rivers, 43,000 acres of reservation land on the boundary of Glacier Park and Lewis & Clark Forest, hydro-power sites on all reservation streams, and rob our reservation economy of $850,000,000 each year. In 1982 the tribal council passed resolutions to recover a billion dollars worth of oil robbed from the Blackfeet Tribe by Joe Sherburne, Texaco, and Great Northern Railway owners Jim and Louis Hill, who went to Washington D.C. and got tribal oil structures "patented" by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The original allotted landowners were victims of mass murders by the agent and county attorney who starved to death 200 Blackfeet landowners who would not sign their "patents" and who died rather than leave their children landless. As a result of the mass murders and massive land frauds the Bureau of Indian Affairs cannot document who owns what lands because the BIA is a defendant in the class-action suit. In 1979 the head of the BIA [Forrest Gerard] testified to Congress that BIA was "Complicit" [partners-in-crime] in the forced patents, a public confession of guilt under oath before Congress. Our ancestors left a record of the forced patents by leading delegations to Congress and exposing the land frauds to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee by 1915. The cause of Blackfeet poverty for a century are Glacier County, border-white men who robbed the successful Blackfeet cattle industry, robbed 300,000 acres of Blackfeet land, robbed the waters at St. Mary for diversions for downstream water users. The underground economy of border-whites on the reservation and the void patent-in-fee titles of whites operating without legal titles usurped trust titles of the Blackfeet allottees and plunged the Blackfeet people into a century of poverty. Our allotted land claims are sitting on the shelf in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee since 2001 when we brought them there! My thought is that the water compact needs our votes, but what about our survival under state law? Our leverage to get tribal council help is no water money for the council until we get our land back!
Bob Juneau Sr.
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