South Dakota v. Yankton Sioux Tribe

What happened

The Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota was established under an 1858 treaty between the United States and the Yankton Tribe. Congress later passed the 1887 Dawes Act, which let the government allot tracts of tribal land to individual Indians and, with tribal consent, open the remaining land to non-Indian settlement.

Tribal members received allotments, and the government then negotiated for the rest. An agreement reached in 1892 provided that the Tribe would "cede, sell, relinquish, and convey to the United States" all its unallotted lands, and the government agreed to pay $600,000. A saving clause said nothing in the agreement should be construed to abrogate the 1858 treaty. Congress ratified the agreement in an 1894 statute, and non-Indians rapidly acquired the ceded lands.

The dispute reached the Court over a solid waste disposal facility on unallotted, non-Indian fee land inside the 1858 boundaries. The Tribe and the federal government said the site was still reservation land and subject to federal environmental rules. South Dakota said the 1894 Act had diminished the reservation, so the land was no longer "Indian country" and the State had primary jurisdiction.

On January 26, 1998, Justice O'Connor wrote for a unanimous Court that the 1894 Act's operative language and the circumstances of its passage showed that Congress intended to diminish the reservation. The Court said the saving clause did not keep the old boundaries, because reading it literally would undo the sale itself. It reversed the Eighth Circuit.

Summarized with AI assistance from 3 sources and checked against their words; not yet reviewed by historians or by the nations. Report an error