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At The Whim Of The Sovereign: Aboriginal Title Reconsidered, Nell Jessup Newton

Journal Articles

Justice Reed, writing for the majority of the United States Supreme Court in Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States, asserted the view: "Every American schoolboy knows that the savage tribes of this continent were deprived of their ancestral ranges by force and that, even when the Indians ceded millions of acres by treaty . . . it was not a sale but the conquerors' will that deprived them of their land."

Justice Reed's historical observation was a predicate to the Supreme Court's holding in Tee-Hit-Ton, one of the most significant statements by the Court on the constitutional rights of Native Americans …