Fishing and Hunting Rights
Although Native Americans consented to or were forced to give up their land, the government allotted them hunting and fishing rights both within their reservations and on their old land that had been sold to and settled by whites. The reserved rights doctrine allowed for tribes to hunt and fish, along with any other rights, as long as they were not specifically denied in a treaty. This angered white hunters and fishers who had restrictions placed on them by the government and they protested against the Indians' right to fish and hunt off of reservations. State agencies pointed out that conservation efforts were possibly compromised by the Native Americans' habits; however the Supreme Court upheld the privilege with certain cases, such as United States v. Winans (1905), even going so far as to appropriate from Native Americans the right to hunt and fish on all of their old grounds whether or not they were currently privately owned. The largest amount of opposition and resentment towards Native Americans' fishing and hunting rights stems from the Pacific Northwest.
Read more about this topic: Native American Civil Rights
Famous quotes containing the words fishing, hunting and/or rights:
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For watermelons gutted to the crust,
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A year and a day to wind and tide; the dust
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Signal smokes, war drums, feathered bonnets against the western sky. New messiahs, young leaders are ready to hurl the finest light cavalry in the world against Fort Stark. In the Kiowa village, the beat of drums echoes in the pulsebeat of the young braves. Fighters under a common banner, old quarrels forgotten, Comanche rides with Arapaho, Apache with Cheyenne. All chant of war. War to drive the white man forever from the red man’s hunting ground.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“In our governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of government contrary to the sense of the constituents, but from the acts in which government is the mere instrument of the majority.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)