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COUNTY OF YAKIMA v. CONFEDERATED TRIBES AND BANDS OF YAKIMA NATION Opinion of Blackmun, J.
I believe that if the majority were inclined to give federal policy interests any effect, its conclusion as to Congress’ “unmistakably clear” intent would doubtless be different today. The nature of federal policy interests emerges clearly from a review of the effects of the Indian land-allotment policies. During the allotment period from 1887 to 1934, Indian landholdings were reduced nationwide, through a combination of sales by allottees to non-Indians and Government sales of “surplus” unallotted lands, from about 138 million acres to 48 million acres. See F. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law 138 (1982). Of the 90 million acres lost, about 27 million acres passed from Indians to non-Indians, as a result of the alienability of the newly allotted land. Ibid. See also Readjustment of Indian Affairs, Hearings on H. R. 7902 before the House Committee on Indian Affairs, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., 17 (Comm. Print 1934) (Memorandum of John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs) (Hearings). For 12,000 years, the Yakima Indians have lived on their lands in eastern Washington. See H. Schuster, The Yakima 14 (1990). Because of the allotment policies, non-Indians today own more than a quarter million acres, more than half the land originally allotted to individual members of the Yakimas. Id., at 83. “Allotment and the subsequent sale or lease of Indian lands accomplished what the ‘genocide’ of epidemics, war, and bootlegged alcohol had not been able to do: a systematic ‘ethnocide’ brought about by a loss of Indian identity with the loss of land.” H. Schuster, The Yakimas: A Critical Bibliography 70 (1982). It is little wonder that, as Congress moved toward repudiating the allotment system in 1934, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs informed Congress: “It is difficult to imagine any other system which with equal effectiveness would pauperize the Indian while impoverishing him, and sicken and kill his soul while pauperizing him, and cast him in so ruined a condition
