Carcieri v. Salazar
The Court ruled that a 1934 federal law letting the Interior Department hold land in trust for Indians only applies to tribes that were already under federal jurisdiction back in 1934. Because Rhode Island's Narragansett Tribe was not under federal jurisdiction until it won recognition in 1983, the Secretary lacked authority to take a 31-acre parcel into trust for the Tribe.
The decision narrows which tribes can benefit from a program that shields tribal land from state and local taxes and regulation, meaning tribes recognized long after 1934 may need Congress, not the Interior Department, to secure trust land.
“We agree with petitioners and hold that, for purposes of § 479, the phrase “now under Federal jurisdiction” refers to a tribe that was under federal jurisdiction at the time of the statute’s enactment.”
The Court's central holding on what 'now under Federal jurisdiction' means in the 1934 law.
How it got here: The Interior Board of Indian Appeals and a federal district court upheld the Secretary's trust decision; the First Circuit affirmed en banc; the state and town asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling.
The Case in Depth
What happened
The Narragansett Tribe, once the dominant Indigenous nation in what is now Rhode Island, lost most of its land and tribal status over centuries before winning federal recognition in 1983. In 1998 the Secretary of the Interior agreed to take a 31-acre parcel the Tribe had purchased into trust, which would exempt it from local zoning and taxes. Rhode Island's governor, the state, and the town of Charlestown objected, arguing the Secretary lacked authority to do so.
The question before the Court
Could the Secretary of the Interior take land into trust for a tribe that only gained federal recognition decades after a 1934 law was passed?
Why it matters
Many of the roughly 200 tribes recognized by the federal government after 1934 could lose an important path to acquiring protected land, since the Interior Department's general trust-land authority no longer reaches them. States and local governments gain a stronger tool to resist land going into trust near them, while newly recognized tribes may need to seek specific acts of Congress instead.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits, so the Secretary's 1998 acceptance of the 31-acre parcel into trust is undone. The Narragansett Tribe and the government did not argue an alternative theory — that the Tribe might separately show it was under federal jurisdiction in 1934 apart from recognition — so that question was left unexplored, prompting Justice Souter's partial dissent favoring a chance to raise it on remand. Other tribes recognized after 1934 face similar limits on this trust-land authority going forward.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether a tribe could show it was actually "under federal jurisdiction" in 1934 through some means other than formal recognition, such as treaties, historical dealings, or blood-quantum status of individual members — an issue Justices Breyer and Souter both flagged as still open on this record.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer agreed with the majority's result but stressed that the word 'now' is not clearly determinative on its own; he relied heavily on legislative history to conclude Congress meant 1934. He also noted that tribes could still show they were under federal jurisdiction in 1934 even if the government didn't realize it then, pointing to examples where later recognition reflected an earlier jurisdictional relationship.
Dissent in part — Justice Souter
Justice Souter, joined by Justice Ginsburg, agreed with most of Breyer's reasoning but objected to the Court's outright reversal. He argued that 'recognition' and being 'under federal jurisdiction' could be separate legal concepts, that no party had actually litigated whether the Narragansett met the jurisdiction requirement separately from recognition, and that the case should be sent back to let the Tribe and Secretary make that argument.
Dissent — Justice Stevens
“curious because it turns “now” into the most important word in the IRA, limiting not only some individuals’ eligibility for federal benefits but also a tribe’s”Stevens' objection that the majority gave outsized weight to a single word in the statute.
Justice Stevens argued the debate over 'now' was beside the point, because the statute lets the Secretary take land into trust for tribes as a group, not just individuals defined by the time-limited 'Indian' definition, and the definition of 'tribe' has no temporal limit at all. He would have upheld the trust acquisition since the Narragansett was validly recognized as a tribe in 1983.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied ordinary rules of statutory interpretation: if a law's text is plain, courts must apply it as written rather than defer to an agency's reading. This meant the Court first had to decide whether the word 'now' in the 1934 law's definition of 'Indian' was clear or ambiguous.
- Looking at how 'now' was defined in dictionaries and used by courts around 1934, and how Congress used 'now' elsewhere in the same law (sometimes pairing it with 'or hereafter' to reach future events, sometimes not), the Court concluded 'now' unambiguously meant the time the statute was enacted, not whenever the government later acts.
- Because the statute was unambiguous, the Court held that the deferential Chevron framework the lower court had used to side with the Interior Department's own interpretation did not apply at all.
- The Court rejected the government's argument that a broader definition of 'tribe' in the same statute could bypass this time limit, reasoning that the 'tribe' definition itself points back to 'Indian tribe,' which is controlled by the same time-limited definition of 'Indian.'
- The Court also rejected an argument that a later 1980s law, the Indian Land Consolidation Act, independently authorized the trust transfer, finding that law only protected tribes that already qualified under the 1934 definition but had opted out of parts of it.
- Applying the 1934 cutoff to the undisputed fact that the Narragansett Tribe was not under federal jurisdiction until 1983, the Court concluded the Secretary lacked authority to take the parcel into trust for the Tribe under this statute.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (467 U. S. 837)
The Court found the statute unambiguous, so the deference courts normally give agencies under Chevron did not apply.