354
Opinion of the Court
Solem, 465 U. S., at 475. That same phrase appears in the annual report of the Commissioner on Indian Affairs that was released in September 1894, just after congressional ratification of the agreement. See Annual Report of the Commissioner on Indian Affairs 26 (Sept. 14, 1894), excerpted in App. 450-452 (noting that under the Siletz, Nez Perce, and Yankton agreements, "some 880,000 acres of land will be restored to the public domain").
Finally, the Presidential Proclamation opening the lands to settlement declared that the Tribe had "ceded, sold, relinquished, and conveyed to the United States, all [its] claim, right, title, and interest in and to all the unallotted lands within the limits of the reservation set apart to said tribe by the first article [of the 1858 Treaty]." Presidential Proclamation (May 16, 1895), reprinted in App. 453. This Court has described substantially similar language as "an unambiguous, contemporaneous, statement by the Nation's Chief Executive, of a perceived disestablishment." Rosebud, 430 U. S., at 602-603.
B
Despite the apparent contemporaneous understanding that the 1894 Act diminished the reservation, in the years since, both Congress and the Executive Branch have described the reservation in contradictory terms and treated the region in an inconsistent manner. An 1896 statute, for example, refers to "homestead settlers upon the Yankton Indian Reservation," 29 Stat. 16, while in a Report included in the legislative history for that statute, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs discusses the "former" reservation, H. R. Rep. No. 100, 54th Cong., 1st Sess., 2 (1896). From the 1896 statutory reference to hearings on the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act nearly a century later, Congress has occasionally, though not invariably, referred to the "Yankton Sioux Reservation." 5
5 Hearings on Pub. L. 100-497, The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, before the Subcommittee on Native American Affairs of the House Committee on Natural Resources, 103d Cong., 2d Sess., 1 (1994) (held,
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