Opinion of the Court
Nation, barred the State from taxing the sale of fuel products on tribal land. See Brief for Petitioner 6–7; Squaxin Island Tribe v. Stephens, 400 F. Supp. 2d 1250, 1262 (WD Wash. 2005). Although a State “generally is free to amend its law to shift the tax’s legal incidence,” Chickasaw Nation, 515 U. S., at 460, it may not burden a treaty-protected right in the process, as the State has done here.
Thus, we must turn to the question whether this fuel tax, falling as it does upon members of the Tribe who travel on the public highways, violates the treaty.
III
A
In our view, the State of Washington’s application of the fuel tax to Cougar Den’s importation of fuel is pre-empted by the treaty’s reservation to the Yakama Nation of “the right, in common with citizens of the United States, to travel upon all public highways.” We rest this conclusion upon three considerations taken together.
First, this Court has considered this treaty four times previously; each time it has considered language very similar to the language before us; and each time it has stressed that the language of the treaty should be understood as bearing the meaning that the Yakamas understood it to have in 1855. See Winans, 198 U. S., at 380–381; Seufert Brothers Co. v. United States, 249 U. S. 194, 196–198 (1919); Tulee, 315 U. S., at 683–685; Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Assn., 443 U. S. 658, 677–678 (1979).
The treaty language at issue in each of the four cases is similar, though not identical, to the language before us. The cases focus upon language that guarantees to the Yakamas “the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places, in common with citizens of the Territory.” Art. III, para. 2, 12 Stat. 953. Here, the language guarantees to the Yakamas “the right, in common with citizens of
