Do we want to turn our homeland into a white man's land; then follow the current blood quantum tribal laws that turns our relatives into whites. The trust lands will follow the loss of tribal membership; as the white land speculators are pouring over the tax liens in the Glacier County courthouse, there in the basement, to pick up Blackfeet lands. The whites know how to rob us better even than the tribal council, Our famous tribal chief has lost himself in his identification with the whites he runs with at Helena, to pick up another award for being famous, it just builds up until he has to shoe the governor with new mocassins. They are riding two horses at once, the white-Indians who bring white rule to the reservation, and fight against tribal land claims-"to give the white robbers a level playing field" is insanity. The absurdity of their reasoning-that bowing to the governor will change anything, is out of touch with the real problems of tribal members-poverty, poor housing, ill-health-the 50% drop-outs caused by a racist Browning school systems dominated by Crees and whites, including white-oriented Blackfeet school boards and administrators. We have followed chief Old Person's diplomacy for generations of bowing to whites, and they just grow bolder, now saying Glacier County would be a nice place to live except for the Indians. Now, they and their white-Blackfeets and Crees say "Cease production of more Blackfeet Indians"!!

The tribal power was freely given, but recoverable; permanent power was unattainable, and coercion was impossible; the power was spread out to 12 or13 band chiefs, with a head chief and two subordinate chiefs chosen by the people. Today the tribal council power is altered by the few tribal political families and the charasmatic tribal chief, and a vertical power structure concentrating the power in a few people with the majority of people consigned to a life of poverty. Political unrest on Indian reservations is spreading nationwide, and the issue of white rule on Indian reservations, and the white-oriented Indians bringing white rule to the reservatiion by promoting state law and state jurisdiction over free treaty Indians. Tribal treaty law is paramount with the removal of white patent-in-fee landowners a priority to re-establish tribal sovereignty and tribal economy. For instance the removal of 30 white ranchers and farmers would add 500,000 acres to the tribal land base to the teeaty guaranteed 1,440,000 acres of allotted Blackfeet lands and $75,000,000 in profits to allotted landowners now taken by whites. The enrollment of Blackfeet descendants will double the federal treaty obligation funds from $110,000,000 to $220,000,000 for IHS-BIA services, tribal housing authority, tribal job training funds, and education funding for B.C.C. and higher education grants. The descendants will inherit the Blackfeet allotted lands. The enrollment issues arise from the government boarding schools, relocation program, and the marriages of Blackfeet to other tribal members, which descendants are mostly Indians, some full-bloods but not enough of one tribe to qualify for enrollment. They are our children and grandchildren. We are pleased to provide a tribal forum for tribal members to voice their opinions-and to contribute information to share with everyone.Our enemies are the white people who have so spitefully stolen our illiterate grandma's land and called it Glacier County with no conscience at all. I hope the treaty illiterate tribal council and white-oriented state senator and county commissioners will confess their robberies of Blackfeet land and invasion of tribal sovereignty and come home to papa. white man no love you.

Blackfeet Enrollment Meeting Scheduled

Tribal Conference Room
Feb.10, 2012

1pm

Contact Edna Osborne for details

Scalping, introduced prior to the French and Indian War by the

English,*confirmed the suspicion that Indians

*Notice, for example the following proclamation: 

Given at the Council Chamber in Boston this third day of

November 1755 in the twenty-ninth year of the Reign

of our Sovereign Lord George the Second by the

Grace of God of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, 

King Defender of the Faith.  

By His Honour's Command

J.Willard, Secry.

God Save the King

Whereas the tribe of Penobscot Indians have repeatedly

in a perfidious manner acted contrary to their solemn

submission unto his Majesty long since made and

frequently renewed.  

I have, therefore, at the desire of the House of

Representatives...thought fit to issue this

proclamation and to declare the Penobscot Tribe

of Indians to be enemies, rebels and traitors to

his Majesty....And I do hereby require his Majesty's

subjects of the Province to embrace all opportunities

of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroy-all and

every of the aforesaid Indians.  

And whereas the General Court of this Province have

voted that a bounty...be granted and allowed to be

paid out of the Province Treasury...the premiums of

bounty following viz: 

For every scalp of a male Indian brought in as evidence

of their being killed as aforesaid, forty pounds. 

For every scalp of such female Indian or male Indian

under the age of twelve years that shall be killed

and brought in as evidence of their being killed as

aforesaid, twenty pounds. 

were wild animals to be hunted and skinned. 

Bounties were set and an Indian scalp became

more valuable than beaver, otter, marten, and

other animal pelts. 

-Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr.     pg.14

The Blackfeet Forced Patent claims cover 293,000 acres of the grazing and farm lands of the reservation that were stooen by white men in 1918-1922, and are the subject of THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS EXTENTSION HEARINGS, Monday, December 17, 1979, U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Indian Affairs, Washington D.C. The 2415 Indian claims program and Public Law 96-217, Section 2, were laws passed by Congress to establish title to Indian lands. Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, Forrest Gerard testfied under Before the Select Committee on Indian Affairs:" Our claims program has affected a significant number of our [white] citizens in this country. In many instances we are dealing with regaining title to property under circumstances in which defendants [white men] 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 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] responsibility to them just as ot does to recognized tribes, bands or groups." 

The local BIA has a list of 1,200 Blackfeet forced patents cases, which are Blackfeet allotments that were stolen by the local white men such as Joe Sherburne, the agency trader, and Blackfeet Agency Superintendents Horace Wilson, F.C. Campbell, and T.C. Power who served as superintendents in rapid succession during 1917-1922 when 293,000 acres of Blackfeet allotments were stolen by the "agency ring' a criminal conspiracy. We tried to get the list of Blackfeet Forced Fee Patents from the BIA superintendent but he wanted over $7,000 for copying costs and the tribal council refused to pay the costs, so we were once again stonewalled from our claims. The frustration is that Chairman Old Person blocked our claims since 1980 and the new tribal council members are following his moccassins. Now the Blackfeet land fraud claims have gone over 500,000 acres and are growing each year. We have all of the research on the claims and it was dubbed a "deliberate conspiracy" by the senate investigator, and he blamed Joe Sherburne and local white men for defrauding the Blackfeet allottees in Glacier County courts. It is deception for Forrest Gerard to testify in Congress that the white men sitting on the stolen Blackfeet allotments "through no fault of their own" because it was a deliberate conspiracy of the BIA and local white men to rob the Blackfeet Indians, and the BIA very well knows where the descendants of the Original Blackfeet allottees are residing because we are all on the reservation and on general assistance thanks to the white men robbing our grandma's. The white ranchers and farmers in Glacier County profit $61,000,000 each year in crops and livestock sales on the stolen Blackfeet allotments, and the Department of Agriculture gives them another $6,000,000 in federal farm subsidies for a total of $67,000,000 on our stolen allotments. That is our land and our money they stole from us. The Blackfeet Indians were successful cattle ranchers by 1896 and their success is written into the 1896 Agreement/Articloe Five which reserved the entire reservation for the support of the Blackfeet cattle ranchers. The allotment act gave the white men the opportunity to rob the illiterate Indians one by one as they were called into the agency office and forced to accept patent in fees on their allotments in violation of the law. We need the tribal council to support our forced patent claims, and we need to send the President a message to open up the Indian claims. We brought the claims to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 1980 and 2001 and again in 2005 but all that time chairman Old Person was telling THE SENATE LAWYER THE BLACKFEET WERE NOT INTERESTED IN PURSUING THE CLAIMS! He was even kicked off the Cobell case claims for secretly giving the information to his BIA masters! The white ranchers and farmers and Glacier County are white apaertheid territory set up on the Blackfeet Reservation on the stolen Blackfeet allotments. The best reservation grazing and farm lands were taken by whites, including oil wells, gas, coal, and the water holes and water courses so that the Blackfeet landowners are forced to lease their dry lands to white ranchers and farmers. This is called the "prisoners dilemma" whereby the disorganized, illiterate Blackfeet allottees are unable to prevent the white men and Glacier County from imposing "collateral or unresolved" conditions on the continued use of their property. This is state coercive power over our private property rights because of the creation of county monopoly power over the treaty rights of the Blackfeet Indians to tax free lands and freedom from state laws on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. The resultant economic damages to the Blackfeet heirs is displayed in the poverty of the Blackfeet Indians and the rich white men sitting on stolen Blackfeet allotments. The only way to break the forced patents conspiracy of the white man, Glacier County and the BIA is public exposure of their crimes against the Blackfeet Indians.  There is the added burden of tribal councilmen and tribal members who are state senator and county commissioners who are fighting against tribal sovereignty, and the passive tribal chief and tribal council in these claims. We have written a history book outlining the Blackfeet claims and have tried for 30 years to get the support of the tribal council. I see the county is suing the tribe for $600,000 in county taxes-that is ridiculous, but understandable because they pushed Old Person around when he was chairman. All we need to do is bring our claims to Congress and the white man will be removed from the reservation by government condemnation payments and ordered off the reservation, and we estimate a billion dollars or more to tribal members in compensation payments to the heirs of the original Blackfeet allottees and trust patentees, but most of all we will have our reservation to ourselves as our ancestors willed it to us. Bob J.

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.

A reader who I infer is part-Indian wrote:                                                                                                       Your book Lies My Teacher Told Me, and especially the chapter"Red Eyes," has had an uprecedented effect on how

I view the world.  I have never felt inclined to write a letter of approval for anything I've read before.  Your

description of the Indian experience in the United States and, more importantly, the concept of a syncretic

American Society has subtly, but powerfully, changed my understanding of my country, and, in fact, my own

ancestry.  If, as Lies My Teacher Told Me shows, history is the least-liked subject in American high schools, it is positively abhorred in Indian Country.  There it is the record of five centuries of defeat.  Yet, properly understood, American history is not a record of Native incompetence but of survival and perseverance. 

-Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen      pg.xiii 

Syncretism is how cultures typically change and survive, and all Americans need to understand that Native American cultures, too, must change to survive.  Natives as well as non-Natives often labor under the misapprehension that

"real" Indian culture was those practices that existed before white contact.  Actually, real Indian culture is still being produced-by sculptors like Nalenik Temela (page 133), musicians like Keith Secola, and American Indian parents everywhere.     

-Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen      pg.xiii-xiv

The United Nations definition of genocide includes physical genocide of which we are familiar in the massacre of Heavy Runner's band, small pox epidemics, whiskey trade, starvation of 600 Blackfeet Indians in the winter of 1883-1884, and the many murders of Indians by whites. Less well known are the "Slow Death Measures" genocides employed by the border-whites today to starve the Indians into the sale of allotted lands and the mass robbery of allotted lands of 500,000 acres of the best reservation lands, and the domination of the reservation economy by white ranchers, farmers, businessmen, energy companies, tourism businesses, and everything that can be stolen. On top of this robbery with the help of the federal trustee, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the whites are slowly disintegrating tribal society by subjecting the Indians to conditions of life which owing to lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene, and medical care are likely to result in the debilitation and early death of Indians, and the deprivation of the means of livelihood by the robbery of the family allotments, looting of the family individual Indian accounts, denial of housing, and economic opportunities available to the white inhabitants of the territory and state concerned, which have reduced the Blackfeet Tribe to a helpless and hopeless condition for generations. The Blackfeet Indians that you see in positions of power that go along with the "slow death measures" are merely looking out for themselves or personally profiting from the white man's occupation of the reservation. That is why Chief Old Person and former Chairman Old Person is honored and feted by the Montana whites and why he is so dishonored to put new moccassins on the governor's feet in the tribal office. He is a tribal traitor. There have been five or six Blackfeet Superintendents of the Browning Public Schools and an Indian School Board since the 1960's yet the schools continue to lose 50% of the Blackfeet school children K-12. No other school district in the nation would allow the loss of 50% of their students without lynching the superintendent. Who do they blame? The little Indian students, that's who? One of my son's has been diagnosed with anxiety caused by white racist teachers in the Browing School District. There are literally hundreds of Blackfeet students who have been mentally damaged for life by racist white school teachers in the Browning public schools. The Blackfeet school superintendent's are "white-oriented" Indians trained to act in a white racist tradition going back to General Pratt's "kill the Indian, save the man" school policy at Carlisle Indian School in 1890. Nothing has changed since Pratt's racism in public schools. 

Why is the state of Montana afraid of teaching Indian history in public schools? It is the white man's genocide and robbery of Indian lands that would surface in the class rooms. How embarrassing, the white man is a savage and a crook. We brought the Blackfeet claims to Congress and Chairman Old Person told the Senators the Blackfeet Indians were not interested in recovering their family allotments. Yet it was Joe Bear Medicine and Willie Running Crane who asked us to help the Blackfeet with the forced patents and the white man robbing their lands. Do you see the difference between "chief" Old Person and the "white-oriented" Indians running the schools? Earl wants to be white like the rest of his minions in the tribal council who do not support tribal treaty rights and the Blackfeet claims, and the Glacier County Commissioners and the state senator who are weakening our treaty rights to be free of white rule and to get our stolen lands returned from the white men. There is no such a thing as "Glacier County" except on the eastern border of the reservation, it is all Blackfeet lands. Keep it in your minds that you are treaty Indians unique in the United States, and try to educate yourselves on your treaty rights so you won't grow

up ignorant and "white-oriented" like chief Old Person and the "white-oriented" Indian politicians who are selling out our treaty rights for the honor of being accepted by the white man. The reservation is the white man's cow pasture, the Indians virtual prisoners of state laws, no control over his property, cut off from economic opportunities available to white men, and imprisoned in the welfare state. It was all planned out long ago by Joe Sherburne and the agency ring, a criminal conspiracy who robbed grandma of her land and oil wells, and severed her title in Glacier County court house. Our Blackfeet history book will set the record straight of genocide practiced against the Piegans who were defending their lands against the Montana Territory border-whites, and the crooked government employees and politicians who helped to rob the Indians in Congress, violence against helpless small pox victims, killing of Heavy Runner's band by drunken army soldiers and Montana militia, burning the women, children and elders alive in their beds, the appalling conditions of health, alcohol, and starvation, the mis-education of Indian children in public schools by white racist teachers, the drop-out rate of 50%, the lies about Indians in history books, denying the Indian an honorable past, the refusal to see the Indians as human beings, the tricks of white legislators in taking Indian property by introducing bills in Congress to enrich their constituents, constant disappointments, indifference of the Montana Senators and state legislature of Indian problems, cutting welfare funds and health services to reservation/counties, and forever awaiting the promises of America for a better life under the constitution and treaty. And now, to think, chief Old Person wants to be like the white man and his minions on the tribal council too! And, the brown faces in county government fighting against Blackfeet Treaty Rights, that is "white-oriented" kool-aid too. Think Blackfeet! Bob J.

"I was retained by the law firm of Goodwin, Proctor, & Hoar to work on Oneida Indian Nation v. New York, a case concerned with the original meaning of the Articles of Confederation." 

-Original Meanings Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution by Jack N. Rakove      pg.X

Successful clinical interventions are not possible in a Native American setting unless the provider or agency is cognizant of the sociohistorical factors that have had a devastating effect on the dynamics of the Native American family.  Beginning in the late 1800s, the U.S. government implemented policies whose effect was the systematic destruction of the Native American family system under the guise of educating Native Americans in order to assimilate them as painlessly as possible into Western society, while at the same time inflicting a wound to the soul of Native American people that is felt in agonizing proportions to this day.  This pain is quite obvious when the family system is examined in a clinical context that employs honesty as a fundamental premise of prevention/intervention. 

-Native American Postcolonial Psychology by Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran      pg.27

A therapist that approaches a family session in a way which does not account for the history of ethnocide perpetrated against Native Americans is him/herself a co conspirator with that history as s/he proceeds with "blaming the victim." 

Native American people have been subjected to one of the most systematic attempts at genocide in the world's history.

-Native American Postcolonial Psychology by Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran        pg.28

For over five hundred years Europeans have attempted to subjugate, exterminate, assimilate, and oppress Native American people.  The effects of this subjugation and extermination have been devastating both physically and psychologically.  Whole tribal groups have been completely exterminated; most of the land that was inhabited by Native Americans has been stolen.  The policies of the U.S. government toward Native American people are shameful, particularly as they have been enacted by a government that preaches freedom and democracy. 

-Native American Postcolonial Psychology by Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran      pg.28