U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote the court\u2019s opinion<\/a> and focused on the 1880 Act, which ratified a settlement in which three Ute bands, including the Uncompahgre, agreed to sell the portion of their reservation in Colorado to the United States in exchange for moving to their current location in Utah.<\/p>\n \u201cSection 3 of the 1880 Act gives the Tribe compensable title to some lands, in directing that the proceeds from certain lands sales be deposited into the Treasury for the benefit of Indians,\u201d Katsas wrote. \u201cThe question is whether those lands fall within the Colorado Reservation or the Uncompahgre Reservation in Utah. Text, structure and historical context all point towards compensable title limited to the Colorado Reservation.\u201d<\/p>\n Katsas pointed to two clauses in Section 3 that specifically cover the unallotted lands \u201creleased and conveyed to the United States,\u201d none of which were in Utah. The Supreme Court ruled the same in 1971, stating that only the lands given to the tribe in an 1868 treaty belonged to them.<\/p>\n According to the tribe, the bands of the Ute Tribe had lived in the Rocky Mountains, with their homeland ranging between Denver and Salt Lake City, since time immemorial.<\/p>\n The 1880 Act<\/a> followed decades of hostility between the Ute bands and the federal government \u2014 where the initial 1863 treaty created a 15.7 million-acre reservation in Colorado that was shrunk in 1874 after valuable mineral deposits were found \u2014 which reached its zenith in 1879 when federal agents were killed in an incident known as the Meeker Massacre.<\/p>\n In retaliation, Congress took steps to dispossess the Utes of their reservation and remove them from Colorado.<\/p>\n In 1882, President Chester Arthur issued an executive order to set aside 1.9 million acres for the Uncompahgre Reservation. Of the total acreage, the government allotted about 12,500 acres to the tribe and sold off some 400,000 acres of unalloyed land, with the remaining 1.5 million acres administered by the government.<\/p>\n The tribe described<\/a> the 1880 Act as forcing the bands into a new agreement, requiring they give up 3.7 million more acres in exchange for a smaller reservation for the Uncompahgre Band in Colorado, if possible, or in Utah.<\/p>\n The case stems from the Ute Tribe\u2019s challenge of a 2018 decision by then-Interior Department Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt denying the tribe\u2019s request to restore the 1.5 million acres in the Uncompahgre Reservation, which had been held as public domain land under the Indian Reorganization Act.<\/p>\n Bernhardt based his decision on a legal opinion from the Office of the Solicitor that found the restoration of lands could only occur if the tribe is entitled to proceeds from any sale of the lands.<\/p>\n He concluded that the public domain lands were not eligible because the federal government could use the land for its own purposes without any need to compensate the tribe.<\/p>\n The tribe then challenged the decision in the federal court, but U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Donald Trump appointee, ultimately granted summary judgment in the government\u2019s favor finding the tribe \u201chas no compensable title to the government-managed land in the Uncompahgre Reservation.\u201d<\/p>\n Katsas similarly rejected the tribe\u2019s argument that the 1880 Act entitled it to a \u201creplacement reservation.\u201d<\/p>\n He said the act did the opposite by providing individual allotments to tribal members which the Supreme Court described as \u201cthe termination of tribal ownership in the reservation lands, and the limitation of Indian ownership to such lands as might be allotted in severalty to individual Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n Further, the tribe\u2019s assertion that ambiguous statutes or treaties must be construed in favor of tribes<\/a> or how tribes would have understood them at the time fails, Katsas wrote, because the relevant law is unambiguous.<\/p>\n