Ranchers And Native Americans Battle At US Supreme Court Over Hunting Rights

A coalition of agricultural interests is backing the state of Wyoming in a Supreme Court Case over the hunting rights of Crow tribal members from a 150-year-old treaty. Eight agricultural groups filed a motion in support of Wyoming on Tuesday for arresting a tribal member, Clayvin Herrera, after he and several other Native Americans killed elk in Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest in 2014. Herrera sued the state, claiming a right to hunt on “unoccupied” federal land secured in a 19th century treaty between the U.S. and the tribe. “We are not seeking to overturn the hunting rights the Crow Tribe reserved in their treaty with the United States,” Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) attorney Cody Wisniewski said in a statement. “Quite the contrary, we are just asking the Court to treat the right as the both the tribe and United States understood it in 1868.” Herrera’s case against Wyoming rests on the meaning of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that set up the Crow reservation. The treaty guarantees that Crow tribal members “shall have the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found thereon, and as long as peace subsists among the whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts,” the treaty says, according to court documents. The case raises two questions about the Crow Tribe’s right to hunt outside the reservation: whether Wyoming’s 1890 statehood nullified the treaty by making all land inside it “occupied,” and whether a national park can be considered “unoccupied” federal land under the meaning of the treaty. The U.S. solicitor general Noel Francisco sided with Herrera against Wyoming when recommending the Supreme Court take up the case in May, according to the solicitor general’s filing...MORE