The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Klickitat County’s claim to a portion of the Yakama Reservation land — the 121,465 acres along the southwest border of the reservation known as Tract D.
The ruling, made without comment, likely ends a border dispute that has lasted more than a century.
“The Supreme Court’s decision once again validates the continuing strength of our treaty rights under the United States Constitution,” Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman Delano Saluskin said. “The Yakama Nation will never compromise when our treaty is at stake.”
Ambiguous language in the Treaty of 1855, drafted by Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens, described a “spur whence flows the waters of the Klickatat and Pisco Rivers” passing south and east of Mount Adams, but the tribe argued that no such spur existed, instead understanding the language to include Tract D.
The tribe received affirmation in their interpretation of the treaty from the Indian Claims Commission in 1966, President Richard Nixon in Executive Order 11670 in 1972, and federal surveyors in 1982.
The current dispute arose in 2017 following the arrest of an enrolled Yakama Nation member, a minor at the time, for a crime committed on Tract D. The Yakama Nation sued Klickitat County over the arrest, seeking a ruling affirming the county’s inability to arrest or detain enrolled tribal members on reservation land.
Klickitat County argued its borders encompassed Tract D due to a 1904 act of Congress that seemed to alter the treaty’s boundaries, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument in June 2021, agreeing with the tribe that Tract D lay within the sovereign territory of the Yakama Nation.
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