Glacier Reporter Letter to the Editor by Robert C. Juneau

To The Editor: 
The intent of our Blackfeet Ancestors was always the survival of the tribe which is partly what they negotiated for in the 1896 Agreement. They made sure the Mixed Bloods were included and recognized by the United States Government as Enrolled Members of the Tribe thus establishing the right of the Blackfeet to set their own standards for Enrolled Membership in the Tribe. Blood Quantum never entered in to their thinking. Blood Quantum was never adopted as a Criteria of Membership until 1962. In the Minutes of Negotiations of the 1895 Blackfeet 
Treaty at the Blackfeet Agency in Montana on September 21, 1895 a Blackfeet Man named Three Suns says,"At the last treaty, the government bought a large tract of land, and it has now sent you to by more land. I wish, not only to be benefitted, but to have my children pleased, by reason of the treaty that we are about to make. We will apprach each other with caution. We are to sell some land that is of little use to us, and we want the price to be satisfactory to all, -the full bloods and the mixed bloods. It is not for myself that I speak, but for the rising generation. If you wish to give a good price, we will be pleased. The responsibility rests on us,-not on the rising generation. We have selected a few mixed bloods and whited to help us in matters that we do not understand. Mr. Conrad and Major Steell have been chosen and you may talk with them." The intent and the purpose of Blood Quantum as a Enrollment Criteria is to eventually choke the Blackfeet Tribe out of existence. In the Wisconsin Women's Law Journal Lucy A. Curry published a article called A Closer Look At Santa Clara Pueblo V. Martinez: Membership By Sex, By Race, And By Tribal Tradition that says on page 187-188,"One's racial identity has defined the scope of one's rights and privileges in Anglo-American culture. For Indian tribes, racial identity has relegated them to an inferior and dependent status within 
the dominant sovereign. The ideologies and laws of the federal government, which granted tribes sovereignty to self-govern and exclude nonmembers, were based on Anglo-American notions of race; the ways in which the Pueblo "chose" to exclude individuals from membership was, and still remains, an important way in which the federal government defines racial identity. Critical race theorists and other social constructionists have greatly contributed to our understanding of the historic and current cultural meanings given to race. Scholar John 
Calmore explains that critical race theory has as its premise a recognition that "'race' is not a fixed term. Instead, 'race' is a fluctuating, decentered complex of social meanings that are formed and transformed under the constant pressures of political struggle. Although our understanding of race has been created by the legal and social relations between people in the United States, the races were treated as natural, objective categories of biological essentialism governed by blood, with white blood as the naked preference. By using 
"objective fact" and natural law, race is made determinant of rationality, superiority, and privilege." Our Blackfeet Ancestors, the signers of the 1896 Agreement, intention for their descendants was for all of their children to be included in the tribe regardless of Blood Quantum which does not scientifically exist anyway. The Enrolled Members of our tribe should honor the intentions of our Ancestors not the product of Scientific Racism Blood Quantum and sign the BEAR Petition so the issue can come to a Secretarial Vote.