Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf
Page Number: 34

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

31 

Opinion of the Court 

notion  that  fee  title  is  somehow  inherently  incompatible
with reservation status.  Maxey v. Wright, 54 S. W. 807, 810 
(Indian Terr. 1900).

By now, Oklahoma’s next move will seem familiar.  Seek-
ing  to  sow  doubt  around  express  treaty  promises,  it  cites 
some  stray  language  from  a  statute  that  does  not  control 
here, a piece of congressional testimony there, and the scat-
tered  opinions  of  agency  officials  everywhere  in  between. 
See, e.g., Act of July 31, 1882, ch. 360, 22 Stat. 179 (refer-
ring to Creek land as “Indian country” as opposed to an “In-
dian reservation”); S. Doc. No. 143, 59th Cong., 1st. Sess.,
33 (1906) (Chief of Choctaw Nation—which had an arrange-
ment similar to the Creek’s—testified that both Tribes “ob-
ject to being classified with the reservation Indians”); Dept.
of Interior, Census Office, Report on Indians Taxed and In-
dians Not Taxed in the U. S. 284 (1894) (Creeks and neigh-
boring Tribes were “not on the ordinary Indian reservation,
but on lands patented to them by the United States”).  Ok-
lahoma stresses that this Court even once called the Creek 
lands a “dependent Indian community,” though it used that
phrase in passing and only to show that the Tribe’s “prop-
erty  and  affairs  were  subject  to  the  control  and  manage-
ment of that government”—a point that would also be true 
if the lands were a reservation.  Creek Nation, 295 U. S., at 
109.  Unsurprisingly given the Creek Nation’s nearly 200-
year occupancy of these lands, both sides have turned up a 
few clues suggesting the label “reservation” either did or did 
not apply.  One thing everyone can agree on is this history 
is long and messy.

But the most authoritative evidence of the Creek’s rela-
tionship to the land lies not in these scattered references; it
lies in the treaties and statutes that promised the land to
the Tribe in the first place.  And, if not for the Tribe’s fee 
title to its land, no one would question that these treaties 
and statutes created a reservation.  So the State’s argument
inescapably  boils  down  to  the  untenable  suggestion  that,