Opinion of the Court
right. See Treaty Between the United States of America and the Eastern Band of Shoshonees [sic] and the Bannack [sic] Tribe of Indians (Shoshone-Bannock Treaty), July 3, 1868, 15 Stat. 674–675 (“[T]hey shall have the right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found thereon, and so long as peace subsists among the whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts”). The Race Horse Court concluded that Wyoming’s admission to the United States extinguished the Shoshone-Bannock Treaty right. 163 U. S., at 505, 514–515.
Race Horse relied on two lines of reasoning. The first turned on the doctrine that new States are admitted to the Union on an “equal footing” with existing States. Id., at 511–514 (citing, e.g., Lessee of Pollard v. Hagan, 3 How. 212 (1845)). This doctrine led the Court to conclude that the Wyoming Statehood Act repealed the Shoshone and Bannock Tribes’ hunting rights, because affording the Tribes a protected hunting right lasting after statehood would be “irreconcilably in conflict” with the power— “vested in all other States of the Union” and newly shared by Wyoming—“to regulate the killing of game within their borders.” 163 U. S., at 509, 514.
Second, the Court found no evidence in the Shoshone-Bannock Treaty itself that Congress intended the treaty right to continue in “perpetuity.” Id., at 514–515. To the contrary, the Court emphasized that Congress “clearly contemplated the disappearance of the conditions” specified in the treaty. Id., at 509. The Court decided that the rights at issue in the Shoshone-Bannock Treaty were “essentially perishable” and afforded the Tribes only a “temporary and precarious” privilege. Id., at 515.
More than a century after Race Horse and four years after Repsis relied on that decision, however, Mille Lacs undercut both pillars of Race Horse’s reasoning. Mille Lacs considered an 1837 Treaty that guaranteed to several
