UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT GUILTY OF BLACKFEET LAND FRAUDS

In 1979 the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Forrest Gerard, under the Secretary of the Interior testified to the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs that, "The United States Government was complicit-[guilty of Indian land fraud crimes as principal or as accessory before the fact]-in the 17,000 forced fee patents land frauds of individual Indian trust landowners across Indian reservations in the United States. Forrest Gerard told the senators "The United States Government would have to sue itself on behalf of its Indian wards" to recover the trust land titles of 17,000 Indians. His sworn testimony caused a panic among states, corporations, white men, and tribal council members guilty of land frauds on Indian reservations, including chairman Old Person and the Blackfeet tribal council who are defendants in the class-action lawsuit in 1982 that included 605 Blackfeet forced fee patents which are forgeries of trust land titles by the officers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Glacier and Pondera county attorneys; Secretarial Sales of Deceased Blackfeet allotted lands, and Old Age Assistance claims whereby Glacier and Pondera county attorneys forced elderly Blackfeet landowners to sell their allotted lands to white men as a prerequisite to receiving welfare assistance. In addition to all of these Blackfeet allotted land frauds the Rocky Boy Cree refugees from Canada were given 101 land allotments of 80 acres each of Blackfeet land over the protests of the Blackfeet chiefs. Most of the Rocky Boy allotments were stolen by white traders, Great Northern Railway and Joe Sherburne agency trader and Glacier county for taxes and liens in county courts. In 1980 I was director of the Blackfeet Natural Resources Department and I was asked by the Blackfeet Honorary Council "to help the people with their land problems" which turned out to be the allotted land frauds. The elders had unique knowledge of treaty issues left unresolved for a century and asked me to prepare a Blackfeet claim for the 352,250 acres robbed by white men. The Blackfeet elders showed us the boundary violations of Glacier Park and Lewis & Clark National Forest whereby 43,000 acres of reservation lands were taken in a boundary survey error in 1897 containing timber and oil & gas and water rights. The eastern boundary of the reservation is east of Cut Bank at Ethridge as it was moved westward when the oil fields were discovered. The southern reservation boundary was moved by the border-whites in Valier and Conrad when they changed the Birch Creek drainage by damming the river at its source into another channel taking all of the waters of Birch Creek. Chairman Old Person ordered me to stop investigating the Bureau of Indian Affairs and I was fired by the tribal council when I refused to stop the forced patents investigations. The man who stopped the Blackfeet claims in 1980 was chairman Old Person who told the senators the Blackfeet did not want to pursue their claims. The man who "extinguished" the Blackfeet claims in the water compact is Chairman Old Person. If we vote to approve the water compact all of our claims are "extinguished, forever!" The forced patents and water compact is the biggest Indian land and water rights swindle in the United States. That is all I have to say about the forced patents forgeries and water compact swindles. Please no on the water compact, it is a human rights violation of thousands of Blackfeet trust landowners.  Bob Juneau Sr.