Thanks for that information PIF. Your info woke me up to another constitutional controversy on the nation's timeline, a problem dealing with statehood, treaties dealing with Native Americans possibly intertwined with questionable congressional terms for statehood.
In case you have not seen the following video, you might find it interesting. Mr. Steven Pratt has claimed possible constitutional problems with the terms of statehood that Congress required at least the last twelve states that were admitted to the Union to agree to.
Steven Pratt, Bound by Oath to Support THIS Constitution
Based on Mr. Pratt’s video, I suspect that the post the Civil War Congress had found a backdoor way to bypass the restrictive terms of the Constitution’s Clause 17 of Section 8 of Article I and the 5th Amendment to acquire land. More specifically Congress was seemingly expanding the land it controlled for free, and with no restrictions on its use, simply by requiring new states to allow the feds to retain control of certain parts of US territories as a condition for new states to be admitted to the Union.
And if such is the case, while I’m glad that the Supremes have decided land use cases in favor of Native Americans, the terms of treaties concerning land for Native Americans were probably affected by this backdoor politics to enlarge federal control of land outside the framework of this Constitution, including regulating water rights.
Again, I respect the clarifications by Thomas Jefferson and state sovereignty-respecting justices of limits on the federal government’s power to negotiate treaties. The feds cannot use their power to negotiate treaties as a vehicle to create new powers for themselves.
Finally, noting that Washington v. Fishing Vessel Assn. was decided in 1979, consider that FDR’s activist justices had swept the 10th Amendment under the carpet decades earlier.
Washington v. Fishing Vessel Assn the inside story: We brought the case, but were not allowed to present it. Instead Slate Gordon, then WA State Attorney General, was up first and changed the topic and we had to spend our time rebutting.
Our case was based on equal rights, not property. At the time Washington v. Fishing Vessel Assn was a landmark which set all other tribes on the road to claim all natural resources as well as enshrined their claimed sovereignty and the resulting first casinos - built and financed by Indonesian money.
While all this was going on, we were being decried for virtually every pulpit in the Western part of WA as thieves, robbers and child molesters - in fact we were even designated WORSE than child molesters.
Even a faux Indian (Marlin Brando’s girlfriend at the time) was brought in from Hollywood to proclaim publicly how vile we were.
The whole thing could have been settled amicably between us and the tribal fishermen, but such hatred was whipped up by the left that it became impossible to even sit in the same room together.
While the Salmon War lasted (1973-1985), lives and families were destroyed, but small consolation that we were the number one topic on the nightly news on all networks at the time. Commonly, the reporters would get both sides and then only show or print the tribal point of view. Any other point of view cost the reporter his/her job and that story was round-filed.
All we wanted was to continue the profession and feed our families. Later, of course, the tribes got theirs for the extreme greed they worked so hard to achieve.