Blackfoot Confederacy declares independence

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Members of the traditional Blackfoot Confederacy have issued a declaration that says they are rejecting Canada's and the United States' jurisdiction over their traditional territory and reverting to the state of affairs that existed before European contact.

Acting on the advice of University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle, the Blackfoot Confederacy now calls itself the Blackfoot Nation. Boyle advised the confederacy members that a nation can be a confederacy but a confederacy is not necessarily a nation, and nationhood is what the declaration is all about.

Two Blood Tribe members and a member of the Montana Blackfoot community travelled to Peigan (about a 40-minute drive west of Lethbridge) for a Jan. 21 meeting at the home of Sikapii-Whitehorse who is also known as George Gallant. He and his wife, Elizabeth Crow Flag, who prefers to be called Yellow Dust Woman, are the keepers of the Beaver Bundle, one of the most sacred objects in Blackfoot tradition. George Gooddagger and Ken Scout, members of Alberta's Blood Tribe, and Long Standing Bear Chief of Browning, Montana attended a meeting that was heralded on various internet usenet groups (computer chat lines) as a momentous occasion in the history of the Blackfoot people.

These people, on behalf of the Blackfoot Confederacy, issued their three-page declaration on Nov. 29. They invited the governor general to attend the Jan. 21 meeting marking the declaration of independence. Governor General Adrienne Clarkson declined to attend because she had a previous engagement, but the letter sent to Sikapii-Whitehorse on her behalf congratulated the Blackfoot people and wished them well.

It's hard to imagine what Clarkson would have made of the conversation among the half-dozen Blackfoot people who sat around the dining room table in Sikapii-Whitehorse's home on the Peigan territory in southwestern Alberta on Jan. 21, but as the figurative head of state of Canada, she probably would not have been comfortable there.

Sikapii-Whitehorse interpreted the letter from Clarkson as an expression of support for the declaration from the governor general, but Rideau Hall press secretary Stewart Wheeler told Windspeaker that the governor general's staff receives hundreds of invitations each year and the standard procedure for dealing with each invitation is to first check to see if the governor general already has something scheduled on the date in question. If that's the case, as it was in the case of the invitation extended by the Blackfoot people, then a letter is sent expressing regrets that Clarkson has a previous engagement and cannot attend.

Only when there is nothing already scheduled and there's a chance the governor general may accept an invitation does the staff research the invitation to see if it would be appropriate for Clarkson or her husband, author John Raulston Saul, to attend. Wheeler said the invitation extended by the Blackfoot people never got to that stage.

"The letter certainly shouldn't be interpreted as an endorsement," he said.

Each of the people around the table at the Peigan meeting told a story of being marginalized by the Indian Act or federally recognized government on their home territory. Each also made it clear that they don't support the elected governments and don't get along too well with the elected leaders of their communities.

Traditional councils in all parts of North America have similar complaints. Most of these councils - the Iroquois Confederacy is a typical example - have no means of raising money and thus are powerless and reduced to a role of criticizing the Indian Act governments in Canada or the federally recognized tribal governments in the United States. But many Indigenous people have a deep-seated respect for the descendants of the traditional, pre-contact chiefs or faith-keepers. In some parts of the country, the traditional councils work together with the elected councils. Those arrangements usually see he traditional (or hereditary) chiefs performing the political role while the elected chiefs perform an administrative role, managing government programs and looking after the roads, sewage treatment and other similar functions of a local government.

Projects which threaten the environment or are clearly unpopular with the majority of the community have been known to allow the traditional chiefs to pull the people together to disrupt the control of the elected councils.

Sikapii-Whitehorse said the traditional Blackfoot lands are immensely resource-rich and yet the elected council, a group he accuses of being an arm of the federal government, allows the majority of its people to live in poverty.

"Ralph Klein brags that $12 to $15 billion a year in resources is taken off our land every year and yet we don't see a cent," he said. "Why are we beggars on our own land?"

He and Long Standing Bear Chief say they have uncovered a variety of illegal moves which invalidate the treaty covering their land (Treaty 7) and they say the elected councils are aware of these illegal actions but don't do anything about them because the elected officials are very well paid to look the other way.

"No man bites the hand that feeds him," said Long Standing Bear Chief. "Especially an ignorant man. But, since the government doesn't feed me, I'm not afraid to bite them."

All confederacy members said that the money extracted from their lands should be available to their people so they can use the funds to re-establish their traditional government and throw out what they see as the corrupt colonizers' system.

Sikapii-Whitehorse said the movement towards independence is in its infancy and will require a lot of organizing and political activism if the goal of being recognized around the world as a sovereign nation is to be achieved.

So far, both federal governments and the local mainstream press have chosen to ignore the declaration, an indication of just how far the former confederacy membes have to go.