Robert C. Juneau Glacier Reporter Letter to the Editor 11-25-12

Glacier Reporter Letter to the Editor
11-25-12
Robert C. Juneau  

To the Editor:  
The intention of the Blood Quantum has always been to legally extinguish the Blackfeet as 
a people.  Patricia Nelson Limerick says in her book The Legacy of Conquest,"Set the blood 
quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indianness, let intermarriage proceed as it had for centuries, and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence.  When that happens, the federal government will be free of its persistent "Indian problem. (338)" Paul Spruhan says in his South Dakota Law Review article entitled A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to 1935,"However, members of Congress, especially Senator Wheeler of Montana, objected to the one-quarter standard:  
I do not think the government of the United States should go out there and take a lot of 
Indians in that are quarter bloods and take them in under this act.  If they are Indians in 
the half blood then the government should perhaps take them in, but not unless they are. 
If you pass it to where they are quarter blood Indians and want to be put on the government 
rolls, and in my judgement it should not be done.  What we are trying to do is get rid of the Indian problem rather than add to it.(46)" Lucy A. Curry writes in her Wisconsin Women's Law Journal article called A Closer Look At Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez:  Membership By Sex, By Race, And By Tribal Tradition,"Even after the IRA, when the federal government officially and formally recognized tribes and Indians with a political rather than a racial distinction, the racial (and thus perceived inherent) difference between Indians and whites still controls the boundaries of tribal powers from their roots in the Eurocentric Doctrine of Discovery.  Therefore, as Professor Robert A. Williams, Jr. eloquently stated, the Indian's self-governing and self-defining vision is recognized, however, only as long as the tribes' desires are consistent with the interests, express or implied, of the European- 
derived vision of the superior sovereign.  [T]his form of discourse enforces a highly 
efficient process of legal auto-genocide, the ultimate hegemonic effect of which is to 
instruct the savage to self-extinguish all troublesome expressions of difference that diverge 
from the white man's own hierarchic, universalized worldview.(199)" The Blackfeet need 
to decide for themselves what the best criteria as to the preservation of their membership 
and landbase is going to be.  The BEAR Petition offers the best solution so far to this 
question.