Letter to the Editor of the Glacier Reporter by Robert C. Juneau

To the Editor: 
I was reading an article recently in Indian Country Today entitled The Ugliness of Indian-on-Indian Racism from February 13, 2014 written by Dina Gilio-Whitaker who is a Freelance Writer and research associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies in Olympia, Washington. In the article she says,"The use of the term breed is of course predicated not on Native concepts of identity and belonging through kinship and relatedness but on settler colonialism's construct of blood quantum. It is no small irony that is the same racist logic of the Social Darwinists of the nineteenth century who equated higher Indian blood quantum with evolutionary inferiority, an ideology that justified the genocidal practices of the U.S. government and led to the massive land theft and assimilationist policies of the Dawes era. Colonialism's legacy on Indian people is manifest in a multitude of ways on the political, institutional, and personal levels. The psychological ramifications are legion as evidenced by a well established body of literature on postcolonial psychology and intergenerational posttraumatic stress disorder. Among the effects are internalized oppression characterized on the individual level by self-hatred, often surfacing as violence within the oppressed group. Violence is closely associated with mental illness. Another way of linking these concepts is to say that colonialism is responsible for the bulk of what shows up as mental illness in Indian Country. But violence can take other forms not limited to physical acts. Racism is a form of psychological violence when perpetrated by anyone. When Indians exhibit intra-cultural racism it is an exercise of internalized oppression, i.e. self-hatred, outwardly directed. It is the manifestation of a colonized mind." The Blackfeet need to get rid of Blood Quantum as an Enrollment Criteria. It is immoral because it denies the vote and the right to run for office to the Blackfeet Descendants. It is impractical because it divides the tribe and will cause it to go extinct by the year 2080. The way to avoid this is for the Enrolled Blackfeet Tribal Members who have not already done so to sign the Blackfeet Enrollment Amendment Reform (B.E.A.R) Petition and let the tribe vote on the issue. There is a webpage on Facebook called Blackfeet Descendants Group where members of B.E.A.R can be contacted for a copy of the petition. In closing Dina says in her article,"Colonization is a mental prison that draws no boundaries based on bloodquantum. Full or mixed blood, we have all been affected. The common ground we share is the history of our families having been ripped apart, our languages stolen and our cultures violently disrupted. When we judge each other based on our genetics all we do is keep ourselves trapped in a prison of someone else's making. And what is that if not a form of insanity?"