For many years Washington’s Yakama Reservation Indians exercised the rights guaranteed to them by a 1855 treaty to travel and carry goods on the state’s highways.
Last week the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the tribe’s rights in Washington State Department of Licensing v. Cougar Den, Inc., in which the state had tried to impose a state duty on the tribe for transporting fuel to the reservation.
The high court reaffirmed by a 5-4 vote that a treaty constitutes federal law that trumps any conflicting state law and rejected Washington state’s efforts to reinterpret the treaty.
In a concurring decision Supreme Court Justice wrote “our job in this case is to interpret the treaty as the Yakamas originally understood it in 1855—not in light of new lawyerly glosses conjured up for litigation . . . more than 150 years after the fact.” Gorsuch added that “the State and federal governments . . . do not get to rewrite the [1855 Treaty] in this Court.”
Gorsuch added, “[T]he treaty doesn’t just guarantee tribal members the right to travel on the highways free of most restrictions on their movement; it also guarantees tribal members the right to move goods freely to and from market using those highways,”
Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman JoDe Goudy hailed the decision, declaring “Yakamas’ conducted trade and commerce long before the formation of the United States, let alone the Washington state’s existence. Our historical Chiefs negotiated for that right to be maintained and it was memorialized within the Articles of the Yakama Treaty of 1855 between the Yakama Nation and the United States.”
