Nevada district water bosses used the drought to cash in on floods of new money available from corporations in what was described in HIGH COUNTRY NEWS as "One of the biggest attempted water swindles in the West." An article entitled "WATER HUSTLE" reporter Matt Jenkins detailed how state prosecutors allege the Southern Nevada Water Board Authority Officials received "kickbacks" for designating water rights of their co-conspirators-some rich landowners-over that of other Nevada water rights owners by manipulating the "priority dates" which values senior water rights dates over junior water rights dates in times of drought-making the junior water rights less valuable on the global water markets. Prior to the Blackfeet water compact approval Blackfeet water rights dated back to "time immemorial" before the arrival of the white man in Blackfoot Country and it is upheld in subsequent treaties and legal precedent. The water compact also restricts the Blackfeet landowners water marketing opportunity; unable to market their water rights for 25 years by which time the water will be quantified and used for commercial purposes such as water leasing and taken by the tribal council water "projects" which are merely fronts for criminal schemes both in the tribe and BIA. We do not know the extent yet of the tribal council tampering with allotted water rights to give the tribal council a head start on marketing tribal water and handing white landowners a golden opportunity to leave us Blackfeet landowners in the dust. In 1982 I brought a water attorney to the tribal council who brought a Wall Street Firm to make an offer to develop tribal and allotted water resources which the tribal council voted no! I later found out tribal council members had crooked deals with white ranchers to lease the reservation for a small lease payment and collect "kickbacks" from the white rancher for devaluing tribal and allotted lands. I was even criticized for jeopardizing the tribal council welfare grants because if we got rich what would they do for a living? They are cannibals who live off the suffering flesh of fellow humans whose poverty brings them money to steal from the tribal poor. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is the federal trustee of trust lands owned by individual Blackfeet landowners and I found the BIA was leasing allotted lands under the same criminal schemes to devalue allottee lands @$5 per acre while third-party Blackfeet lease holders sub-lease to white ranchers and they got the kickback from defrauding Blackfeet landowners. The white ranchers and farmers get a revenue stream of over $67,000,000 in Glacier County largely from leasing Blackfeet lands under this system of government corruption. Do we want to continue to "trust" the tribal council and BIA to change their criminal ways under the water compact? The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act is the federal law under which tribal government was authorized in 1936, but it has never stopped the tribal council and BIA from robbing the Blackfeet landowners. The IRA also authorized the organization of district cooperatives "to cut out the [white] middleman" from the business of the tribe and trust landowners and to provide loans and credit to landowners for the improvements of land and to purchase cattle and equipment to maintain a cattle ranch or some type of agricultural cooperative or a cooperative to market Blackfeet arts & crafts to Glacier Park tourists. In fact, the Blackfeet Arts & Crafts Cooperative is the most successful coop on the reservation until the tribal council was invented to allow nine politicians to control 16,000 tribal members, and you know the history of the tribal council, and not one council member has ever gone to federal prison, a record unknown to mankind of perfect human beings! We can either cower in tribal housing slums and let the crooks rob our water or we can use our civil rights and treaty rights to form water cooperatives to develop and to protect our last remaining resource-water! I know the Wall Street Firm is still out there awaiting the day when the Blackfeet Indians overcome crooks in the council and BIA to proudly bid out our water resources to the highest bidder on our terms whatever they may be decided by the water cooperatives on every creek, river, and lake the tribal council did not give away in the water compact, which is our allotted land water rights. Let us meet in the landowner's council to decide this most important issue facing us since the water compact was approved by the people. I am ready to provide research to substantiate our claims for self-development the Indian Reorganization Act gave us and also which created the constitution that torments us today. Vote it out and give us back the power we had prior to the nine man crooks called the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council.
Let me know of any interest in developing landowners water cooperatives which will give us bargaining power when the bids for our water go out instead of allowing the tribal council to negotiate for us or the BIA either! They will "lease" our water for $50 per acre foot and sub-lease for millions of dollars and laugh all the way to the bank. We need to manage our own water resources.
Bob Juneau Sr. trust landowner
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