532
Opinion of the Court
B
The Tribe's ANCSA lands do not satisfy either of these requirements. After the enactment of ANCSA, the Tribe's lands are neither "validly set apart for the use of the Indians as such," nor are they under the superintendence of the Federal Government.
With respect to the federal set-aside requirement, it is significant that ANCSA, far from designating Alaskan lands for Indian use, revoked the existing Venetie Reservation, and indeed revoked all existing reservations in Alaska "set aside by legislation or by Executive or Secretarial Order for Native use," save one. 43 U. S. C. § 1618(a) (emphasis added). In no clearer fashion could Congress have departed from its traditional practice of setting aside Indian lands. Cf. Hagen v. Utah, 510 U. S. 399, 401 (1994) (holding that by diminishing a reservation and opening the diminished lands to settlement by non-Indians, Congress had extinguished Indian country on the diminished lands).
The Tribe argues--and the Court of Appeals majority agreed, see 101 F. 3d, at 1301-1302--that the ANCSA lands were set apart for the use of the Neets'aii Gwich'in, "as such," because the Neets'aii Gwich'in acquired the lands pursuant to an ANCSA provision allowing Natives to take title to former reservation lands in return for forgoing all other ANCSA transfers. Brief for Respondents 40-41 (citing 43 U. S. C. § 1618(b)). The difficulty with this contention is that ANCSA transferred reservation lands to private, state-chartered Native corporations, without any restraints on alienation or significant use restrictions, and with the goal of avoiding "any permanent racially defined institutions, rights,
the same weight as other, more relevant ones: "the degree of federal ownership of and control over the area," and "the extent to which the area was set aside for the use, occupancy, and protection of dependent Indian peoples." Id., at 1301. By balancing these "factors" against one another, the Court of Appeals reduced the federal set-aside and superintendence requirements to mere considerations.
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