The billionaire blocking off Montana's wildlife: 'Like fencing people out of Walmart'

[riversedge]

America's dirty divide
The billionaire blocking off Montana’s wildlife: ‘Like fencing people out of Walmart’

The fences Joe Ricketts erected around his ranch in the middle of the Blackfeet reservation are a deadly hazard for wildlife

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/29/joe-ricketts-bison-ranch-fences-blackfeet-reservation



by Sierra Cistone

Last modified on Wed 29 Jun 2022 13.32 EDT


Almost immediately after their new billionaire neighbor put up miles of 5ft fences around his Montana ranch, complaints started coming in to the Blackfeet tribe.

In photos and videos captured by Blackfeet tribal members and reviewed by the Guardian, animals such as elk, deer, moose and grizzly bears can be seen struggling to navigate around or over the fences as they follow a historical migration path. Sometimes, they are trapped in corners of the fences, or wounded and limping after failed attempts to jump over the barriers. On numerous occasions, mother moose have been seen separated from their young.

“It would be like fencing people out of Walmart,” says Buzz Cobell, the director of the Blackfeet fish and wildlife department and Blackfeet tribal member. “It wouldn’t take long for people to start screaming bloody murder.”

The fences are owned by the founder of the financial services firm TD Ameritrade, Joe Ricketts, and they enclose his commercial bison ranch, Grizzly Ridge Bison Ranch. It’s a sprawling 32,000-acre property on Blackfeet reservation land. Tribal members complain that Ricketts is a terrible neighbor, failing in his responsibility to work with the tribe to keep wildlife safe.



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Yet the existence of Grizzly Ridge Bison Ranch is a reminder of a brutal history. The ranch is a byproduct of the 1887 Dawes Act, an anti-Indigenous piece of legislation that aimed to break up tribal land and assimilate tribes into western private property ideologies. The law allowed the US government to divide reservations into parcels of land and allot it to tribal members and non-tribal homesteaders, breaking up both the land and the communal living traditions that are fundamental in Native communities.

As a result of the Dawes Act, tribes ultimately lost control of two-thirds, or 90m acres, of the original land designated for tribal reservations. Such land is still considered part of the reservation but is not owned or managed by the tribe. Many tribes across the US, including the Blackfeet Nation, are making concerted efforts to buy this land back........................................................................




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Joe Ricketts, owner of the Grizzly Ridge Bison Ranch. Photograph: Nati Harnik/Associated Press




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[Casady1]

1. The Ricketts are terrible people

Sell the Cubs.

[pfitz59]

2. scumbag billionaires with no understanding or regard for nature

story as old as time

[Karadeniz]

3. Never too late to rectify, Montana....

[GoldandSilver]

4. Native Americans have never been given a fair shake.

Dawes is merely one sign of the disregard. They aren’t politically strong enough to fight back and I don’t see that ever changing. Sadly, one day “Native Americans” will only exist n good history books.

As for Joe Ricketts, may he be gored to death by one his beasts.