BILLINGS -- A federal appeals court has affirmed a Montana regulation that bans non-Indians from big game hunting within American Indian reservations, even if the land is privately owned.

A Colorado-based legal foundation challenged the ban on behalf of a Montana man in 2005, saying it discriminated against non-Indians and violated private-property rights.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its ruling last week that the regulation was legal. The court said it was not a racial ban but one based on tribal membership, making it political.

The ruling upheld a February 2007 decision from U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull in Billings, in a lawsuit brought by Randy Roberts. Roberts, of Billings, was blocked by the state regulation from hunting on his mother's 1,500 acres within the Crow Reservation.

Many reservations have large pockets of land owned by non-Indians. In some cases, the land was given away by the federal government decades ago to homesteaders. Non-Indians also buy land from tribal members.

The state first barred non-Indians from hunting on reservations in the 1950s, at the request of some tribes, said Bob Lane, an attorney for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Tribal members can hunt anywhere on a reservation with landowner consent.

Attorney Scott Detamore with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represented Roberts, said the group likely will attempt to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Detamore acknowledged the chances of the case being heard were slim.

''At the bottom of it, it's really a property issue,'' he said. ''We don't see it so much as an Indian issue. (Non-Indians) ought to be able to hunt on their own land.''

Lane said that since many tribes have their own hunting rules and laws, it did not make sense for the state to govern the pockets of non-Indian private land within reservations.

''We're dealing with them as a sovereign government,'' Lane said. ''We're not particularly interested in trying to regulate hunting there when we only have part of it.''