Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/18pdf/17-532_q86b.pdf
Page Number: 10.0

Cite as:  587 U. S. ____ (2019) 

7 

Opinion of the Court 

right.  See  Treaty  Between  the  United  States  of  America 
and  the  Eastern  Band  of  Shoshonees  [sic]  and  the
Bannack [sic] Tribe of Indians (Shoshone-Bannock Treaty),
July  3,  1868,  15  Stat.  674–675  (“[T]hey  shall  have  the 
right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States
so  long  as  game  may  be  found  thereon,  and  so  long  as 
peace  subsists  among  the  whites  and  Indians  on  the  bor-
ders  of  the  hunting  districts”).  The  Race  Horse  Court 
concluded that Wyoming’s admission to the United States 
extinguished  the  Shoshone-Bannock  Treaty  right.    163 
U. S., at 505, 514–515. 

Race  Horse  relied  on  two  lines  of  reasoning.    The  first 
turned on the doctrine that new States are admitted to the 
Union  on  an  “equal  footing”  with  existing  States.    Id.,  at 
511–514  (citing,  e.g.,  Lessee  of  Pollard  v.  Hagan,  3  How. 
212  (1845)).  This  doctrine  led  the  Court  to  conclude  that 
the  Wyoming  Statehood  Act  repealed  the  Shoshone  and 
Bannock  Tribes’  hunting  rights,  because  affording  the 
Tribes  a  protected  hunting  right  lasting  after  statehood
would  be  “irreconcilably  in  conflict”  with  the  power—
“vested in all other States of the Union” and newly shared
by Wyoming—“to regulate the killing of game within their 
borders.”  163 U. S., at 509, 514. 

Second,  the  Court  found  no  evidence  in  the  Shoshone-
Bannock  Treaty  itself  that  Congress  intended  the  treaty 
right to continue in “perpetuity.”  Id., at 514–515.  To the 
contrary,  the  Court  emphasized  that  Congress  “clearly
contemplated  the  disappearance  of  the  conditions”  speci-
fied in the treaty.  Id., at 509.  The Court decided that the 
rights  at  issue  in  the  Shoshone-Bannock  Treaty  were 
“essentially  perishable”  and  afforded  the  Tribes  only  a 
“temporary and precarious” privilege.  Id., at 515. 

More  than  a  century  after  Race  Horse  and  four  years 
after  Repsis  relied  on  that  decision,  however,  Mille  Lacs 
undercut  both  pillars  of  Race  Horse’s  reasoning.  Mille 
Lacs considered an 1837 Treaty that guaranteed to several