Lawyer Blog on Civil and Human Rights
On July 10, 1890, Wyoming’s statehood was granted and it became the 44th state of the U.S.Decades and decades later, in January 2014, Clayvin Herrera of the Crow Tribe of Indians pursued a pack of elk outside his tribe’s reservation in Montana , and was led into Wyoming’s Bighorn National Forest. This hunt led to him being fined, receiving a suspended jail sentence, and having his hunting privileges suspended for three years.
When the decision was upheld by a state appellate court and then passed over by the Wyoming Supreme Court, Herrera asked the Supreme Court for review. The question at issue was, when Wyoming became a state, did the Crow Tribe members’ right to hunt outside the bounds of their state lines cease to exist? Herrera contended that his rights under an 1868 treaty between the tribe and federal government weren’t cut off when Wyoming achieved statehood, because, as the court came to find, the Wyoming Statehood Act did not negate the Crow Tribe’s hunting rights nor did the 1868 treaty expire at that time. Herrera also argued that the creation of the Bighorn National Forest actually reinforced the Tribe’s hunting rights by prohibiting settlement on that land. Understandably, Herrera expressed concern that his tribe was not the only one affected by the Wyoming court’s ruling.
The State of Wyoming argued that Herrera’s conviction should stand because Wyoming becoming a state abolished his tribe’s off-reservation hunting rights.