650
Opinion of the Court
must rely upon their retained or inherent sovereignty. In Montana, the most exhaustively reasoned of our modern cases addressing this latter authority, we observed that Indian tribe power over nonmembers on non-Indian fee land is sharply circumscribed. At issue in Montana was the Crow Tribe's attempt to regulate nonmember fishing and hunting on non-Indian fee land within the reservation. Although we "readily agree[d]" that the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty authorized the Crow Tribe to prohibit nonmembers from hunting or fishing on tribal land, 450 U. S., at 557, we held that such "power cannot apply to lands held in fee by non-Indians." Id., at 559. This delineation of members and nonmembers, tribal land and non-Indian fee land, stemmed from the dependent nature of tribal sovereignty. Surveying our cases in this area dating back to 1810, see Fletcher v. Peck, 6 Cranch 87, 147 (1810) (Johnson, J., concurring) (stating that Indian tribes have lost any "right of governing every person within their limits except themselves"), we noted that "through their original incorporation into the United States as well as through specific treaties and statutes, Indian tribes have lost many of the attributes of sovereignty." 450 U. S., at 563.1 We concluded that the inherent sovereignty of Indian tribes was limited to "their members and their territory": "[E]xercise of tribal power beyond what is necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control internal rela-1 We also noted that nearly 90 million acres of non-Indian fee land had been acquired as part of the Indian General Allotment Act, 24 Stat. 388, as amended, 25 U. S. C. § 331 et seq., which authorized the issuance of patents in fee to individual Indian allottees who, after holding the patent for 25 years, could then transfer the land to non-Indians. Although Congress repudiated the practice of allotment in the Indian Reorganization Act, 48 Stat. 984, 25 U. S. C. § 461 et seq., we nonetheless found significant that Congress equated alienation "with the dissolution of tribal affairs and jurisdiction." Montana, 450 U. S., at 559, n. 9. We thus concluded that it "defie[d] common sense to suppose that Congress would intend that non-Indians purchasing allotted lands would become subject to tribal jurisdiction." Ibid.
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