Cite as: 526 U. S. 172 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
to resolve that conflict by abrogating the treaty." United States v. Dion, supra, at 740. There is no such "clear evidence" of congressional intent to abrogate the Chippewa Treaty rights here. The relevant statute—Minnesota's enabling Act—provides in relevant part:
"[T]he State of Minnesota shall be one, and is hereby declared to be one, of the United States of America, and admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever." Act of May 11, 1858, 11 Stat. 285.
This language, like the rest of the Act, makes no mention of Indian treaty rights; it provides no clue that Congress considered the reserved rights of the Chippewa and decided to abrogate those rights when it passed the Act. The State concedes that the Act is silent in this regard, Brief for Petitioners 36, and the State does not point to any legislative history describing the effect of the Act on Indian treaty rights.
With no direct support for its argument, the State relies principally on this Court's decision in Ward v. Race Horse, 163 U. S. 504 (1896). In Race Horse, we held that a Treaty reserving to a Tribe " 'the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States, so long as game may be found thereon, and so long as peace subsists among the whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts' " terminated when Wyoming became a State in 1890. Id., at 507 (quoting Art. 4 of the Treaty). This case does not bear the weight the State places on it, however, because it has been qualified by later decisions of this Court.
The first part of the holding in Race Horse was based on the "equal footing doctrine," the constitutional principle that all States are admitted to the Union with the same attributes of sovereignty (i. e., on equal footing) as the original 13 States. See Coyle v. Smith, 221 U. S. 559 (1911). As relevant here, it prevents the Federal Government from impair-
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