Cite as: 522 U. S. 329 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
unallotted lands within said reservation shall be restored to the public domain." See 510 U. S., at 412.
The 1894 Act is also readily distinguishable from surplus land Acts that the Court has interpreted as maintaining reservation boundaries. In both Seymour v. Superintendent of Wash. State Penitentiary, 368 U. S. 351, 355 (1962), and Mattz v. Arnett, 412 U. S. 481, 501-502 (1973), we held that Acts declaring surplus land "subject to settlement, entry, and purchase," without more, did not evince congressional intent to diminish the reservations. Likewise, in Solem, we did not read a phrase authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to "sell and dispose" of surplus lands belonging to the Cheyenne River Sioux as language of cession. See 465 U. S., at 472. In contrast, the 1894 Act at issue here—a negotiated agreement providing for the total surrender of tribal claims in exchange for a fixed payment—bears the hallmarks of congressional intent to diminish a reservation.
B
The Yankton Tribe and the United States, appearing as amicus for the Tribe, rest their argument against diminishment primarily on the saving clause in Article XVIII of the 1894 Act. The Tribe asserts that because that clause purported to conserve the provisions of the 1858 Treaty, the existing reservation boundaries were maintained. The United States urges a similarly "holistic" construction of the agreement, which would presume that the parties intended to modify the 1858 Treaty only insofar as necessary to open the surplus lands for settlement, without fundamentally altering the treaty's terms.
Such a literal construction of the saving clause, as the South Dakota Supreme Court noted in State v. Greger, 559 N. W. 2d 854, 863 (1997), would "impugn the entire sale." The unconditional relinquishment of the Tribe's territory for settlement by non-Indian homesteaders can by no means be reconciled with the central provisions of the 1858 Treaty,
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