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14 

HAALAND v. BRACKEEN 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

[C]rown  to  interfere  with  the  internal  affairs  of  the  Indi-
ans.”  Id., at 547; see also Vattel 60.  Instead, the “settled 
state of things” reflected the British view that Tribes were 
“nations capable of maintaining the relations of peace and 
war; [and] of governing themselves.”  6 Pet., at 548–549. 

Consistent with that understanding, the British regarded
“the Indians as owners of their land.”  S. Banner, How the 
Indians Lost Their Land:  Law and Power on the Frontier 
12  (2005).  Britain  often  purchased  land  from  Tribes  (at
least nominally) and predicated its system of legal title on
those purchases.  Ibid.  The Crown entered into all manner 
of  treaties  with  the  Tribes  too—just  as  it  did  with  fellow 
European  powers.    See,  e.g.,  Letter  from  Gov.  Burnet  to 
Lords of Trade, Nov. 21, 1722, concerning the Great Treaty 
of 1722 Between the Five Nations, the Mahicans, and the 
Colonies of New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, in 5 Doc-
uments Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New 
York  655–681  (E.  O’Callaghan  ed.  1955);  Deed  in  Trust 
From Three of the Five Nations of Indians to the King in 
1726, in id., at 800–801; A Treaty Held at the Town of Lan-
caster with the Indians of the Six Nations in 1744, in Indian 
Treaties,  Printed  by  Benjamin  Franklin,  1736–1762, 
pp. 43–49 (1938).

Ultimately, “the American Revolution replaced that legal
framework  with  a  similar  one.”  Oklahoma  v.  Castro-
Huerta, 597 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) 
(slip op., at 2).  The newly independent Nation wasted no 
time entering into treaties of its own—in no small part to
secure  its  continued  existence  against  external  threats. 
See,  e.g.,  Articles  of  Agreement  and  Confederation,  Sept.
17, 1778, 7 Stat. 13.  In practice, too, “[t]he new Republic” 
broadly  recognized  “the  sovereignty  of  Indian  [T]ribes,” 
even if it did so “sometimes grudgingly.”  W. Quinn, Federal 
Acknowledgment of American Indian Tribes:  The Histori-
cal Development of a Legal Concept, 34 Am. J. L. Hist. 331,
337 (1990).  As we will see, the period under the Articles of