878
Opinion of Souter, J.
held instead that unmistakability was needed for waiver, not reservation.
Most recently, in United States v. Cherokee Nation of Okla., 480 U. S. 700 (1987), we refused to infer a waiver of federal sovereign power from silence. There, an Indian Tribe with property rights in a riverbed derived from a Government treaty sued for just compensation for damage to its interests caused by the Government's navigational improvements to the Arkansas River. The claim for compensation presupposed, and was understood to presuppose, that the Government had conveyed to the Tribe its easement to control navigation; absent that conveyance, the Tribe's property included no right to be free from the Government's riverbed improvements. Id., at 704. We found, however, that the treaty said nothing about conveying the Government's navigational easement, see id., at 706, which we saw as an aspect of sovereignty. This, we said, could be " 'surrendered [only] in unmistakable terms,' " id., at 707 (quoting Bowen, supra, at 52), if indeed it could be waived at all.
Merrion, Bowen, and Cherokee Nation thus announce no new rule distinct from the canon of construction adopted in Providence Bank and Charles River Bridge; their collective holding is that a contract with a sovereign government will not be read to include an unstated term exempting the other contracting party from the application of a subsequent sovereign act (including an Act of Congress), nor will an ambiguous term of a grant or contract be construed as a conveyance or surrender of sovereign power. The cases extending back into the 19th century thus stand for a rule that applies when the Government is subject either to a claim that its contract has surrendered a sovereign power 22 (e. g., to tax or
22 "Sovereign power" as used here must be understood as a power that could otherwise affect the Government's obligation under the contract. The Government could not, for example, abrogate one of its contracts by a statute abrogating the legal enforceability of that contract, Government contracts of a class including that one, or simply all Government con-
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