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Blackfeet Reservation
Where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountain Front
The Blackfeet Reservation covers about 2,400 square miles of northwestern Montana, where the Great Plains run up against the wall of the Rocky Mountain Front. It borders Glacier National Park on the west and Canada on the north, and its people, the Amskapi Piikani, belong to the Blackfoot Confederacy that also includes three nations in Alberta. The tribe is based at Browning, and Chief Mountain, sacred to the Blackfeet, rises at the reservation's northwest edge.
Much of Glacier's eastern half came from a mountain strip the Blackfeet ceded in an 1895 agreement, a transfer many tribal members still regard as a lease rather than a sale, and the tribe retains rights there. In 2016 Congress approved a water rights settlement worth about $471 million, ratified by tribal members in 2017, and the sacred Badger-Two Medicine area has since been cleared of oil and gas leases. Blackfeet banker Elouise Cobell led the landmark class action that forced the federal government to account for mismanaged Indian trust funds.