Black Feet, Nation



The Blackfeet Nation also known as the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation[1]  is an Indian reservation and headquarters for the Siksikaitsitapi people in the United States. Located in Montana, its members are composed primarily of the Piegan Blackfeet (Ampskapi Piikani) band of the larger ethnic group historically described as the Blackfoot Confederacy. It is located east of Glacier National Park and borders the Canadian province of Alberta. Cut Bank Creek and Birch Creek form part of its eastern and southern borders. The reservation contains 3,000 square miles (7,800 km2), twice the size of the national park and larger than the state of Delaware. It is located in parts of Glacier and Pondera counties.

The reservation is also east of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, which contains the Badger-Two Medicine area, sacred to the Blackfeet people.[2]  This sacred part of the Rocky Mountain Front was excluded from Blackfeet lands in a Treaty of 1896 but they reserved access, hunting and fishing rights. Since the early 1980s, when the Bureau of Land Managementapproved drilling rights leases without consultation with the tribe, the Blackfeet have worked to protect this sacred area, where they practiced their traditional religious rituals.

The federal government suspended all leasing activities for drilling in this area in the 1990s, and in 2007 the Bush administration made permanent a moratorium on issuing new permits. Many leaseholders had already relinquished their leases, and in November 2016 the Department of Interior announced the cancellation of the 15 drilling rights leases held by Devon Energy Corporation in the Badger-Two Medicine area.[2]  The Blackfeet had documented that the area was not a "wilderness," as the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex was designated in 1964, but a "human landscape" shaped by and integral to their culture.[2]