South Dakota v. Bourland, 508 U.S. 679, 22 (1993)

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700

SOUTH DAKOTA v. BOURLAND

Blackmun, J., dissenting

County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation, 470 U. S. 226, 247 (1985), the majority is right to proceed on the assumption that authority to control hunting and fishing is included in the Fort Laramie Treaty.

The question, then, is whether Congress intended to abrogate the Tribe's right to regulate non-Indian hunting and fishing on the taken area—a right flowing from its original sovereign power that was expressly confirmed by treaty. This Court does not lightly impute such an intent to Congress. There must be "clear evidence that Congress actually considered the conflict between its intended action on the one hand and Indian treaty rights on the other, and chose to resolve that conflict by abrogating the treaty." United States v. Dion, 476 U. S. 734, 740 (1986); see also Wheeler, 435 U. S., at 323 (implicit withdrawal of inherent sovereignty only where "necessary"); Colville, 447 U. S., at 153-154 (same).

The majority, however, points not even to a scrap of evidence that Congress actually considered the possibility that by taking the land in question it would deprive the Tribe of its authority to regulate non-Indian hunting and fishing on that land. Instead, it finds Congress' intent implicit in the fact that Congress deprived the Tribe of its right to exclusive use of the land, that Congress gave the Army Corps of Engineers authority to regulate public access to the land, and that Congress failed explicitly to reserve to the Tribe the right to regulate non-Indian hunting and fishing. Despite its citation of Dion, supra, Menominee Tribe v. United States, 391 U. S. 404 (1968), and County of Yakima v. Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakima Nation, 502 U. S. 251 (1992), see ante, at 687, the majority adopts precisely the sort of reasoning-by-implication that those cases reject.

The majority supposes that the Tribe's right to regulate non-Indian hunting and fishing is incidental to and dependent on its treaty right to exclusive use of the area and that the Tribe's right to regulate was therefore lost when its right to

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