Cite as: 526 U. S. 172 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
Horse, the Court concluded that the right to hunt on federal lands was temporary because Congress could terminate the right at any time by selling the lands. 163 U. S., at 510. Under this line of reasoning, any right created by operation of federal law could be described as "temporary and precarious," because Congress could eliminate the right whenever it wished. In other words, the line suggested by Race Horse is simply too broad to be useful as a guide to whether treaty rights were intended to survive statehood.
The focus of the Race Horse inquiry is whether Congress (more precisely, because this is a treaty, the Senate) intended the rights secured by the 1837 Treaty to survive statehood. Id., at 514-515. The 1837 Treaty itself defines the circumstances under which the rights would terminate: when the exercise of those rights was no longer the "pleasure of the President." There is no suggestion in the Treaty that the President would have to conclude that the privileges should end when a State was established in the area. Moreover, unlike the rights at issue in Race Horse, there is no fixed termination point to the 1837 Treaty rights. The Treaty in Race Horse contemplated that the rights would continue only so long as the hunting grounds remained unoccupied and owned by the United States; the happening of these conditions was "clearly contemplated" when the Treaty was ratified. Id., at 509. By contrast, the 1837 Treaty does not tie the duration of the rights to the occurrence of some clearly contemplated event. Finally, we note that there is nothing inherent in the nature of reserved treaty rights to suggest that they can be extinguished by implication at statehood. Treaty rights are not impliedly terminated upon statehood. Wisconsin v. Hitchcock, 201 U. S. 202, 213-214 (1906); Johnson v. Gearlds, 234 U. S. 422, 439-440 (1914). The Race Horse Court's decision to the contrary—that Indian treaty rights were impliedly repealed by Wyoming's statehood Act—was informed by that Court's conclusion that the Indian treaty rights were inconsistent with state sovereignty
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