Long before there was a Utah or a Wyoming, tribes "ceded" this land while keeping the right to hunt and fish it forever, and that promise could sink the entire public lands sell-off.

Scattered across the national forest and BLM maps are millions of acres that tribes ceded to the United States in the 1800s while keeping the right to hunt, fish, and gather on them. That word "ceded" carries a lot of weight, and most of these deals came under military pressure, economic desperation, and in more than a few cases outright fraud. Nobody should read it as a willing sale. However they were taken, the rights the tribes reserved are federal law, and the Supreme Court has twice ruled they survive statehood, most recently for a Crow hunter in Wyoming's Bighorn National Forest, where it held that setting land aside as a forest doesn't extinguish the right.

Here's the mechanism they're counting on you to miss. A land sale never repeals the treaty. It just sells the ground the right stands on, and once that open land is fenced and developed, the right has nowhere left to exist. You can erase a promise older than the state without ever writing the words.

We've seen where that road ends. When the government seized the Black Hills in 1877, it collected the signatures of about ten percent of the men a treaty required, under military threat, and called it a sale. The Supreme Court later called it a theft and awarded compensation. The Sioux have refused to touch the money for over forty years, because cashing the check would finish the sale. The fund has grown past a billion dollars, untouched, and the land stays gone.

The people auctioning off public land are betting nobody reads the fine print that predates the map. The treaties are that fine print. They came first, and they still bind.

See where your delegation stands on the Public Lands Scorecard, get on the record through PLAN, and share this with someone who thought the sell-off was only about trailheads.