Opinion ID: 412102
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The effect of the 1898 Agreement.

Text: 19
20 Article IV of the Agreement provides for the reservation of grazing rights: 21 So long as any of the lands ceded ... remain part of the public domain, [the Tribes] shall have the right ... to pasture their livestock on said public lands.... 22 371 Stat. 674. 23 Land cession agreements between the United States and Indian tribes are to be interpreted as grants by the Indians to the United States. The Indians reserve any rights not explicitly granted. Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Ass'n, 443 U.S. 658, 680-82, 99 S.Ct. 3055, 3071-72, 61 L.Ed.2d 823 (1979); United States v. Winans, 198 U.S. 371, 380-81, 25 S.Ct. 662, 663-64, 49 L.Ed. 1089 (1905). The Tribes reserved grazing rights in the 1868 Treaty lands. Nothing in the 1898 Agreement indicates that the Tribes granted away these rights to the United States. 24 Agreements between the United States and Indian tribes are to be construed according to the probable understanding of the original tribal signatories. Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Ass'n, 443 U.S. at 675-76, 99 S.Ct. at 3069. There is nothing in the record to indicate that the Tribes understood that they were ceding their grazing rights along with their possessory rights. The plain language of the Agreement is to the contrary. In addition, by 1898 the Tribes had begun to rely on the production of meat from the communal herd. Not until 1907 did the Forest Service oust the Tribes from the grazing lands. This is further indication that the Tribes did not believe they had given up these rights in 1898. 25 The non-Indian permittees' reliance on United States v. Gemmill, 535 F.2d 1145, 1147-49 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 982, 97 S.Ct. 496, 50 L.Ed.2d 591 (1976), is misplaced. We held there only that aboriginal Indian land rights which no treaty, agreement, or statute had specifically recognized were extinguished when, among other things, those lands were included within a national forest. 26 b. The words public domain in Article IV of the Agreement include lands within the national forests. 27 The non-Indian permittees argue that even if the Treaty and Agreement reserved Tribal grazing rights in ceded lands, those rights were extinguished because national forests are not part of the public domain encompassed by Article IV of the Agreement. The non-Indian permittees rely on the technical argument that public domain includes only lands open to sale or settlement under federal law and that the establishment of a forest reserve withdraws those lands from the public domain. We reject this argument. None of the cases cited by the permittees concerns the abrogation of Indian treaty rights. See Barker v. Harvey, 181 U.S. 481, 21 S.Ct. 690, 45 L.Ed. 963 (1901); Shannon v. United States, 160 F. 870 (9th Cir.1908). Rather, these cases stand for the undisputed proposition that the federal government, by withdrawing lands formerly open to sale or settlement, may lawfully assert a power to control the use of these lands by the public. There is nothing in either of these cases to suggest that this distinction between public domain and reservations has any bearing on the question of how and when treaty rights of Indian tribes in those lands may be extinguished. 28 In Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation v. Maison, 262 F.Supp. 871, 873 (D.Or.1966), aff'd sub nom. Holcomb v. Confederated Tribes, 382 F.2d 1013 (9th Cir.1967), the court explicitly rejected a technical reading of treaty language and held that ceded national forest lands are within the scope of expressly reserved Indian off-reservation use rights. In United States v. Blendaur, 128 F. 910, 913 (9th Cir.1904), the court dealt explicitly with the construction of the words public lands: 29 The words public lands are not always used in the same sense. Their true meaning and effect are to be determined by the context in which they are used, and it is the duty of the court not to give such a meaning to the words as would destroy the object and purpose of the law or lead to absurd results. 30 There is no evidence that the Tribes originally understood the Article IV terms public domain and public lands in a narrow, legalistic sense. Nor is there any evidence that these terms, when used in 1898, were intended to carry a technical meaning which might ultimately deprive the Tribes of the retained use rights for which they had bargained. The legislative history of the 1900 Ratifying Act reveals no congressional intent that would sustain the permittees' strained construction of these terms. 31 A narrow, technical reading of the words public lands and public domain would produce an effect which the parties could not have anticipated. Such a reading would render Article IV of the Agreement meaningless by destroying the grazing rights which were to be the vehicle for transforming the Tribes into the agrarian society so much desired by the Government. 32