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Page Number: 33.0

30 

MCGIRT v. OKLAHOMA 

Opinion of the Court 

will forever secure and guaranty to them . . . the country so
exchanged  with  them,”  but  also,  “if  they  prefer  it,  . . .  the 
United States will cause a patent or grant to be made and 
executed to them for the same.”  4 Stat. 412.  Recall that the 
Creek insisted on this additional protection when negotiat-
ing the Treaty of 1833, and in fact received a land patent 
pursuant to that treaty some 19 years later.  In the eyes of
Oklahoma, the Tribe’s choice on this score was a fateful one. 
By  asking  for  (and  receiving)  fee  title  to  their  lands,  the 
Creek inadvertently made their tribal sovereignty easier to
divest rather than harder. 

The  core  of  Oklahoma’s  argument  is  that  a  reservation
must be land “reserved from sale.”  Celestine, 215 U. S., at 
285.  Often, that condition is satisfied when the federal gov-
ernment promises to hold aside a particular piece of feder-
ally owned land in trust for the benefit of the Tribe.  And, 
admittedly,  the  Creek’s  arrangement  was  different,  be-
cause the Tribe held “fee simple title, not the usual Indian 
right  of  occupancy.”  United  States  v.  Creek  Nation,  295 
U. S. 103, 109 (1935).  Still, as we explained in Part II, the 
land was reserved from sale in the very real sense that the
government could not “give the tribal lands to others, or to
appropriate them to its own purposes,” without engaging in 
“ ‘an act of confiscation.’ ”  Id., at 110. 

It’s hard to see, too, how any difference between these two
arrangements  might  work  to  the  detriment  of  the  Tribe. 
Just  as  we  have  never  insisted  on  any  particular  form  of 
words  when  it  comes  to  disestablishing  a  reservation,  we
have never done so when it comes to establishing one.  See 
Minnesota v. Hitchcock, 185 U. S. 373, 390 (1902) (“[I]n or-
der  to  create  a  reservation  it  is  not  necessary  that  there 
should be a formal cession or a formal act setting apart a 
particular tract.  It is enough that from what has been there 
results a certain defined tract appropriated to certain pur-
poses”).  As long as 120 years ago, the federal court for the 
Indian Territory recognized all this and rightly rejected the