The Supreme Court upheld the federal government's 19th-century treaty with the Montana-based Crow Tribe this week, in what community advocates and legal experts are heralding as a victory for Native American rights. The case reaffirms the Constitutional supremacy of treaty rights signed between the United States and Native nations, amid continued standoffs between tribal and state administrations over the historic agreements.
On Monday, the court ruled 5–4 to uphold an 1868 treaty between the United States and the Crow Tribe, now located in southern Montana, by which the tribe relinquished ancestral lands in what would become northern Wyoming but maintained rights to hunt and fish there. A lower court ruling had convicted Crow Tribe member Clayvin Herrera for off-season hunting on Wyoming public lands.
Wyoming had argued that the treaty that allowed Herrera access to the lands had specified that Crow Tribe members could hunt and fish in "unoccupied lands," and thus became invalidated when Wyoming achieved statehood in 1890. The state "argued that the treaty right was terminated when it entered the Union, claiming that all lands in Wyoming were legally 'occupied,'" explains director of the Michigan State University Indigenous Law & Policy Center Matthew Fletcher.
The Supreme Court disagreed with that assessment. "The Crow Tribe's hunting rights survived Wyoming's statehood," the majority decision written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor reads.
Trump administration appointee Neil Gorsuch joined liberal justices to rule in favor of upholding the treaty. In his short tenure in the Supreme Court, Gorsuch has repeatedly ruled in favor of Native American rights.
Monday's ruling reversed an 1896 Supreme Court decision, Ward v. Race Horse, "which states like Wyoming had claimed supported their efforts to fight treaty rights," Fletcher says. In the 1896 case, the Supreme Court ruled against the Bannock Tribe's treaty rights to hunt off their official reservation grounds, finding that statehood had exempted Wyoming from it. "Race Horse held that Wyoming's admission to the Union terminated treaty rights in that state. The Court never followed that case in any other state, and now it apparently never will."
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito writes that the majority ruling was "not a model of clarity" and that it "takes a puzzling course." Alito argues that, contrary to the majority's findings, another case involving hunting on Wyoming public lands, Crow Tribe of Indians v. Repsis, does preclude Herrera and the Crow Tribe from exercising their treaty rights.