Cite as: 526 U. S. 172 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
have been included within the reservation. Thus, in 1901, the United States and the Tribe entered into a second agreement, in which the United States agreed to compensate the Tribe for those lands, and the Tribe agreed to " 'cede, surrender, grant, and convey to the United States all their claim, right, title and interest in and to' " the lands erroneously excluded from the reservation. Id., at 760. The Tribe contended that the 1901 agreement had not abrogated its usufructuary rights under the 1864 Treaty with respect to those lands.
We rejected the Tribe's argument and held that it had in fact relinquished its usufructuary rights to the lands at issue. We recognized that the 1864 Treaty had secured certain usufructuary rights to the Tribe, but we also recognized, based on an analysis of the specific terms of the Treaty, that the 1864 Treaty restricted those rights to the lands within the reservation. Id., at 766-767. Because the rights were characterized as "exclusive," this "foreclose[d] the possibility that they were intended to have existence outside of the reservation." Id., at 767. In other words, "because the right to hunt and fish reserved in the 1864 Treaty was an exclusive right to be exercised within the reservation, that right could not consistently survive off the reservation" on the lands the Tribe had sold. Id., at 769-770. This understanding of the Tribe's usufructuary rights under the 1864 Treaty—that those rights were exclusive, on-reservation rights—informed our conclusion that the Klamath Tribe did not retain any usufructuary rights on the land that it ceded in the 1901 agreement, land that was not part of the reservation. In addition, we noted that there was nothing in the historical record of the 1901 agreement that suggested that the parties intended to change the background understanding of the scope of the usufructuary rights. Id., at 772-773.
Klamath does not control this case. First, the Chip-pewa's usufructuary rights under the 1837 Treaty existed independently of land ownership; they were neither tied to a
201
Page: Index Previous 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007