Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/18pdf/17-532_q86b.pdf
Page Number: 31.0

6 

HERRERA v. WYOMING 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

District Court that, under Race Horse, “[t]he Tribe’s right
to hunt reserved in the Treaty with the Crows, 1868, was 
repealed  by  the  act  admitting  Wyoming  into  the  Union.” 
Crow Tribe of Indians v. Repsis, 73 F. 3d 982, 992 (1995).
Second,  as  an  independent  alternative  ground  for  affir-
mance,  the  Tenth  Circuit  held  that  the  Tribe’s  hunting 
right  had  expired  because  “the  treaty  reserved  an  off-
reservation  hunting  right  on  ‘unoccupied’  lands  and  the
lands of the Big Horn National Forest are ‘occupied.’ ”  Id., 
at  993.  The  Tenth  Circuit  reasoned  that  “unoccupied” 
land  within  the  meaning  of  the  treaty  meant  land  that 
was open for commercial or residential use, and since the 
creation of the national forest precluded those activities, it 
followed  that  the  land  was  no  longer  “unoccupied”  in  the 
relevant sense.  Ibid. 

B 
The events giving rise to the present case are essentially
the  same  as  those  in  Race  Horse  and  Repsis.  During  the
winter  of  2013,  Herrera,  who  was  an  officer  in  the  Crow 
Tribe’s  fish  and  game  department,  contacted  Wyoming
game officials to offer assistance investigating a number of 
poaching incidents along the border between Bighorn and 
the  Crow  Reservation.3   After  a  lengthy  discussion  in
which  Herrera  asked  detailed  questions  about  the  State’s
investigative  capabilities,  the  Wyoming  officials  became 
suspicious of Herrera’s motives.  The officials conducted a 
web  search  for  Herrera’s  name  and  found  photographs 
posted  on  trophy-hunting  and  social  media  websites  that 
showed him posing with bull elk.  The officers recognized
from  the  scenery  in  the  pictures  that  the  elk  had  been 

—————— 

3 Such  cooperative  law  enforcement  is  valuable  because  the  Crow 
Reservation  and  Bighorn  National  Forest  face  one  another  along  the 
border  between  Montana,  where  the  Crow  Reservation  is  located,  and 
Wyoming, where Bighorn is located.  Supra, at 3.  The border is deline-
ated by a high fence intermittently posted with markers.