100 Years Page #3

right down here a ways.

So, as time went by, they would

not allow the Indian people

to carry arms or hunt

because they wanted them

to be very dependent

on the Indian agent.

People were made

to just hang around

and wait for rations.

And the story goes

that the Indian agent

was selling off the rations

that were supposed

to come to women and children

and the men that had to stay

confined to this area

without any means to hunt.

And so, as a result,

we ended up with

which is called

"the Starvation Winter."

Right in this particular area,

over 500 Blackfeet died,

and all the people that died,

they just threw them

into these open pit graves.

But the Blackfeet always

used to bury their dead

above the ground.

They felt that their bodies

would go back to the animals

and to the birds,

and so it was hard

for them to get accustomed

to something

that was foreign to them.

And that's why they had

the boxes above the ground.

In some places,

you can just see

pieces of the wood

from the boxes that were here.

[bird cawing]

[Elouise] I always

liked numbers,

so I went

to a commercial college,

a business school

in Great Falls, Montana.

I had an emphasis

on accounting.

The FDIC came in

and closed down the existing

bank that was here.

We said, "Well,

why don't we start a bank?"

And we now have

the Native American Bank.

We're really proud

of what we were able

to accomplish.

These are homes

that were financed

by Native American Bank

and are owned

by individual people.

Uh, financing, home mortgages,

it's all new

to Indian communities.

[Charles] The country

was moving west.

People wanted farmland,

people wanted timberland

and mineral land,

and tribes had those things.

And this was at a time, also,

when people saw Indians

as a disappearing race,

as the vanishing Indian.

And so, Congress passed

the Dawes Act of 1887.

[Anthony] What was once

an Indian reservation,

or once a solid mass of land

that belonged to the Indians,

is now divided up

into 500 different parcels.

When allotment happened,

Indians had 150 million

odd acres.

When allotment ended,

Indians had 55 million acres.

It was a clear acceleration

of the dispossession of

Indian lands,

no doubt about it.

President Roosevelt's

State of the Union speech

a hundred years ago,

and he said,

"The General Allotment Act

pulverized tribal governments.

It's meant to civilize

the Indians. Give them a plow."

But Indians... Most tribes

aren't farming tribes.

[chuckles]

And so, land was leased out

to non-Indians,

and the same is true

with tribal timber sales

and tribal oil

and gas operations.

Those monies went

to the United States

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