The Blackfeet Community Blog

Share your stories and write articles with the Blackfeet Community.
Tagged in: Untagged 
Posted by: blkftpatriot

The "confessions" of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs to Congress in 1979 to complicity in the Forced Patents of Indian Trust lands did not translate into the removal of white patent-in-fee landowners from the reservation by government condemnation payments. President Reagan basically told the Congress to shove their 96-217, section 2 law where the sun don't shine, and there it has remained. The tribal chairmen were scared back to the reservation leaving the Indian allottees and their heirs to face the issue alone because of the complicity of the federal trustee in the transfer of Indian trust titles to whites patent-in-fee land status. We have been trying to percolate the forced patent claims from the bottom up since 1980, while the tribal chairmen chased the cash rabbit in the IIM Cobell case claims, which by the way robbed the Indian heirs of their cash settlement by draining off the cash to other uses and encourages the poor Indians to "give" their trust land fragments to corrupt tribal councils. Please read the STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS HEARINGS, of Monday, December 17, 1979, U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Indian Affairs, "The purpose of the hearing this morning is to determine the status of the work of the Department of the Interior and Department of Justice in identifying and processing claims of Indians and individuals that arose before 1966." Mr. Forrest Gerard, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs testified "Our claims program has affected a significant number of our [white] citizens in this country. In many instances hardships may result as a result of our suits. In many of these same instances we are dealing with regaining [Indian trust] title to [Indian] property under circumstances in which [white] defendants through no fault of their own are holding by void title. The title issues in these claims are not subject to the statute of limitations as are the tort issues. A great majority of the thousands of Indian claimants are heirs of deceased allottees or trust patentees. We are unable to locate many of them. The United States, of course, has a [trust] responsibiity to them just as it does to recognized tribes, bands, or groups." The tens of thousands of Indian heirs to the Original Indian Allottees and Trust Patentees have been forgotten by the National Indian Organizations and the tribal chairmen chasing the IIM cash rabbit and forgot the land issues of white men robbing the individual Indian allottees, or washed their hands of responsibility to help the poor Indians. The constitutional scholars point out "the absence of constitutional limits on state power creates a socially destructive "prisoners dilemma," wherein the disorganized, [illiterate] Indian land owners are unable to prevent the state [border-whites] from imposing "collateral or unrelated" conditions upon their continued use of their lands." Throw in the "complicity" of the federal trustee and you come up with a system of white political and economic apartheid transplanted upon the Indian reservations by whites occupying stolen property of the Individual Indian allottees on the Indian reservations on state lands called "reservation/counties" that are designated as "divided sovereigns" by state legislatures. It is nothing more than a white land grab of Indian lands, and should be treated as such. I want to know where our National Indian leaders and Indian organizations that collect millions of dollars each year to defend Indian rights reside? Come to the reservation and see the impoverished Indian claimants and the rich white ranchers. Check out the Census of Agriculture, County Profile, if you want to research how much revenue the white patent-in-fee landowners on the reservation profit on the stolen Indian allotments. Glacier County, which land base is 80% of Blackfeet trust allotments stolen by white ranchers and farmers profit $61,000,000 in livestock and crop sales on the Indian allotments and another $6,000,000 in federal Department of Agricultural payments for a total of $67,000,000 on Blackfeet Allotments. That is a condition of white political and economic apartheid territory on the Indian reservations. Is that the hardships on white people Mr. Gerard, our top federal trustee of Indian trust property was worried about? What about the early Indian deaths attributed to poverty of the Indians caused by government corruption? Who is going to help us Indians at the bottom on the reservations? God help us if that is our national Indian leaders and federal trustees. Hitler would be proud of the "Slow Death Measures" of Indian genocide over the past century. Is this a Christian nation? My dad helped to save the Jews in World War II as a combat veteran, yet his children and grandchildren are oppressed by white apartheid on the reservation. His war to free the oppressed people has not been won on the Indian reservations.