‘WE GET PEOPLE’S ATTENTION WHEN TRIBAL LEADERS SPEAK OUT”

‘WE GET PEOPLE’S ATTENTION WHEN TRIBAL LEADERS SPEAK OUT”

            Casey Perkins director of the Montana Wilderness Association thanked Chairman Barnes, Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, and Chief Old Person for political support in getting the Forest Service to cancel oil & gas leases in the Badger Two Medicine. She said, “We get people’s attention [Forest Service] when tribal leaders speak out, tribal elections in the summer of 2014 brought in a new [tribal] administration amenable to working with outside groups, and a partnership has flourished.”

We, the Blackfeet landowners, have tried to get the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council and Chief Old Person to support Blackfeet cattle rancher’s treaty rights to tribal reserved grazing lands and just compensation for the self-reliant cattle industry robbed by Glacier County border-whites. The massive land frauds included starving 200 Blackfeet in the winter of 1913, and once again in 1919-1922 two hundred more Blackfeet were starved and beaten in the agency jail to “force” them to sign Patents-in-Fee on their trust land allotments. Tribal political families do not want the Senate Indian Affairs Committee to hold field hearings on the Blackfeet Reservation. Why is that?

            The Blackfeet Honorary Council of Tribal Elders, Blackfeet traditional people like Willie Running Crane and Joe Bear Medicine requested investigation of the “Forced Fee Patents Cases on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.” These tribal elders exposed treaty violations concerning robbery of Blackfeet allotted lands, and reservation boundary issues at Glacier Park, the eastern boundary at Ethridge, and the southern boundary at Birch Creek moved southward by Pondera County.  

The western reservation boundary containing 13,000 acres from Divide Mountain to the Canadian border were taken by Glacier Park officials moving survey monuments down the mountain instead of the original treaty survey of 1887 that established the boundary on the mountain tops, and robbery of 43,000 acres of tribal land from Divide Mountain to the western end Two Medicine Lake to Heart Butte taken by the Lewis & Clark National Forest containing timber, oil & gas deposits, and water rights taken by Great Northern Railway.

The Blackfeet Chiefs retained oral history of the violence that caused the poverty and hopelessness that is the reality of the Blackfeet people today. The 1855 Treaty protected the Blackfeet Indians from “depredations of white men passing through or living in their country, may commit.” The 1896 Agreement/Article Five “Guaranteed” to the 500 self-reliant Blackfeet cattle ranchers “exclusive use and occupancy of the reserved grazing lands where their cattle herds may feed, undisturbed.”

These types of treaty violations are war crimes done by white men and remain historical injustices. A treaty to prevent just such war crimes did not hold against Montana border-whites who still envy and covet Blackfeet property like our water rights which, once again, Chairman Old Person gave to them in the water compact. The water  compact extinguishes all Blackfeet claims forever, so it better be right, or the poverty will continue forever.

Tribal Elder Joe Bear Medicine told Earl, “You never do anything for the fullbloods.” I have had council members order me to forget it. The council refusal to help allotted landowners has led us to economic depression on the reservation and collapse of the Blackfeet cattle ranchers economy. Tribal council refusal to defend the Blackfeet Nation encourages white men in Glacier County to pursue our last water rights. What does it mean to belong to the Blackfeet Nation? Any old white man can get what he wants by bullying the tribal council?

B.C.C. President Kipp banned my book, “The Sacred Buffalo Vision” from the college and refused to allow me to do a seminar on the political/economic history of Montana border-whites robbing the Blackfeet trust landowners. She told people more security would have to be hired if Bob Juneau brought his book into the college. Her grandfather is in the book, an agency employee who throwed the Blackfeet Chiefs Wolf Plume, Young Man Chief, and Black Weasel into the agency jail because they were boarding the eastbound train to Washington D.C. to report the forced patents of allotted lands and the starvation of hundreds of Blackfeet to force them to sign fee patents on their lands.

But she hired a white author to bring his book to the college and paid him $5,000 to mock the same incident I described in my book, of starving Blackfeet, by saying some “dead Indians” were seen walking around the next spring, and got a big laugh from her. What if I said I saw “dead Jews” walking around after the Nazi holocaust in World War Two? Would that be funny too! Who is she protecting by censoring the truth about robbery and murders of our ancestors?

The BIA is trying to forget its role in the Blackfeet holocaust, complicit in the deaths and massive robberies of trust land of the Blackfeet Indians. Montana Department of Public Instruction, Glacier County Superintendent of Schools, and the white-oriented Blackfeet/Cree school board do not teach Blackfeet political history in public schools, but they do teach the savage Indian curriculum in the Browning Public Schools. The history is a memory of treaty-breaking holocaust of Blackfeet landowners and they fear that justice will be done for Blackfeet victims and their descendants who live in poverty due to the holocaust.

They have nothing to fear from judgment because justice is not the issue, they hope the statute of limitations has run out, and they are “home on the reservation” forever. The only ones that remembered are the chiefs and they are gone, and now all we have left is a book banished from the Blackfeet College. The sacred buffalo vision is a gift to the Blackfeet people. Once you were great. Maybe that is all disappeared in the “fog of history.”

 In 1983 when we were in Washington D.C. bringing our claims to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Forrest Gerard was testifying to Congress, “You can hear stories that there are thousands upon thousands of claims out in the misty mountains. On the other hand, we knew of about 1,000, but we also knew there might be more. We did have people who were trying to tell us. We also had problems with BIA records. We had claims that frankly had grown stale, and to dig them up took a lot more effort than if you were trying to find current claims. We have gone to the extent, even, of hiring historians because we have found that their assistance has been instrumental in helping to solve some of these problems. They are experts on the condition and location of Bureau records. BIA records are stored all over creation. Some of them are not in very usable condition. Each one of the claims has to be prepared separately because each claim may involve title to different land, which means a separate abstract, and may affect different Indian heirs. It means a great research process as well. Many of the claims will not have litigation reports to reach the Justice Department before the administrative deadline because they need an abstract of title, factual research, or legal research. On the one hand the Indian claims were originally founded in a breach of contract and a title claim, but the fact that the state [of Montana] has been in wrongful possession of the [Blackfeet] Indian land for the past 112 years in a trespass against the Indians interest, and therefore it lies in a tort rather than contract, and is not precluded by the statute of limitations. There are countless Indian people and Indian tribes whose potential claims have not yet been given a fair opportunity to be reviewed in terms of their validity. The remaining question that both Congress and the Executive Branch must face is whether there is a continuing exposure to the United States Government in the unresolved Indian claims and violations of tribal sovereignty and loss of Indian trust property.”

THE REMAINING QUESTION FOR THE BLACKFEET TRIBAL BUSINESS COUNCIL IS WHY DID YOU EXTINGUISH OUR CLAIMS IN THE WATER COMPACT, FOREVER!