Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf
Page Number: 16

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

13 

Opinion of the Court 

tracts, while saving the ultimate fate of the land’s reserva-
tion status for another day.5 

C 
If  allotment  by  itself  won’t  work,  Oklahoma  seeks  to 
prove disestablishment by pointing to other ways Congress
intruded on the Creek’s promised right to self-governance
during  the  allotment  era.    It  turns  out  there  were  many.
For example, just a few years before the 1901 Creek Allot-
ment Agreement, and perhaps in an effort to pressure the
Tribe  to  the  negotiating  table,  Congress  abolished  the 
Creeks’ tribal courts and transferred all pending civil and 
criminal cases to the U. S. Courts of the Indian Territory.
Curtis Act of 1898, §28, 30 Stat. 504–505.  Separately, the 
Creek  Allotment  Agreement  provided  that  tribal  ordi-
nances  “affecting  the  lands  of  the  Tribe,  or  of  individuals
after  allotment,  or  the  moneys  or  other  property  of  the 
Tribe,  or  of  the  citizens  thereof ”  would  not  be  valid  until 
approved  by  the  President  of  the  United  States.    §42,  31
Stat. 872. 

Plainly,  these  laws  represented  serious  blows  to  the 

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5 The dissent doesn’t purport to find any of the hallmarks of diminish-
ment in the Creek Allotment Agreement.  Instead, the  dissent  tries to 
excuse their absence by saying that it would have made “little sense” to
find  such  language  in  an  Act  transferring  the  Tribe’s  lands  to  private 
owners.  Post, at 14.  But the dissent’s account is impossible to reconcile 
with history and precedent.  As we have noted, plenty of allotment agree-
ments  during  this  era  included  precisely  the  language  of  cession  and 
compensation that the dissent says it would make “little sense” to find 
there.    And  this  Court  has  confirmed  time  and  again  that  allotment
agreements without such language do not necessarily disestablish or di-
minish the reservation at issue.  See Mattz v. Arnett, 412 U. S. 481, 497 
(1973); Seymour v. Superintendent of Wash. State Penitentiary, 368 U. S. 
351, 358 (1962).  The dissent’s only answer is to  suggest that allotment 
combined with other statutes limiting the Creek Nation’s governing au-
thority amounted to disestablishment—in other words that it’s the argu-
ments in the next section that really do the work.