Yellen v. Confederated Tribes of Chehalis Reservation
The Supreme Court ruled that Alaska Native Corporations qualify as 'Indian tribes' under federal law and are therefore eligible to receive a share of the $8 billion in COVID-19 relief Congress reserved for tribal governments.
The decision, reached by an unusual 6-3 coalition, resolved a split between federal appeals courts and confirmed a legal status the executive branch had recognized for the corporations for nearly half a century.
How it got here: A federal district court granted summary judgment for the Treasury Department and the ANCs; the D.C. Circuit reversed; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to resolve a split with the Ninth Circuit.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) are for-profit, state-chartered companies Congress created in 1971 to hold land and money on behalf of Alaska Natives after settling their land claims. When COVID-19 struck, Congress set aside $8 billion in relief specifically for tribal governments. The Treasury Department reserved roughly $450 million for ANCs. Federally recognized tribes across the country sued, arguing that ANCs — which have no formal government-to-government relationship with the United States — do not qualify as tribal governments and should not receive the money.
The question before the Court
Could Alaska Native Corporations — for-profit companies Congress created to manage land and money for Alaska Natives — share in the $8 billion the CARES Act set aside for tribal governments responding to COVID-19?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court ruled that Alaska Native Corporations are 'Indian tribes' under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (ISDA) and therefore count as tribal governments eligible for CARES Act COVID relief funds.
The Court reached that conclusion two ways. First, reading ISDA's 'Indian tribe' definition by its plain language: the definition expressly 'includes' entities 'established pursuant to' the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act — which is exactly how ANCs were created — and ANCs are thereby recognized as eligible for that Act's substantial benefits, satisfying the definition without needing to be federally recognized in a political sense. Second, even if that reasoning failed, the Court said the definition's final limiting clause should not be read to apply to ANCs at all, because doing so would absurdly exclude the very entities the definition went out of its way to name.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
About $450 million in COVID-19 relief funds will flow to Alaska Native Corporations rather than exclusively to federally recognized tribes elsewhere in the country. The ruling also cements the corporations' standing under dozens of other federal programs — including housing and energy grants — that use the same statutory definition of 'Indian tribe.'
What changes now
The D.C. Circuit's ruling is reversed and the cases are sent back to that court for further proceedings. The Treasury Department may proceed with distributing the approximately $450 million it had set aside for ANCs. ANCs also retain eligibility for other federal programs using ISDA's 'Indian tribe' definition — such as housing and energy grants — though some of those programs have additional requirements the Court did not address here.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not make Alaska Native Corporations into federally recognized tribes or give them a government-to-government relationship with the United States. The Court also explicitly held it does not open the door for other non-federally-recognized groups to claim Indian tribe status under ISDA, and it did not decide whether the recognized-as-eligible language has become a term of art in statutes enacted after ISDA.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Alito
Justice Alito joined the judgment and agreed with the majority's result, but did not join the sections analyzing ISDA's plain meaning (Part II-A) or the rejection of the federally-recognized-tribe term-of-art argument (Part II-B). He did join the majority's alternative path — that even if the recognized-as-eligible clause applies to ANCs, the most reasonable reading is that it simply does not exclude them — as well as the sections addressing remaining arguments and the recognized-governing-body question.
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch argued that the recognized-as-eligible clause applies to ANCs just as it does to every other entity in ISDA's list, and that the clause requires formal government-to-government recognition — a status ANCs have never had. He found both of the majority's theories unpersuasive: the plain-meaning reading renders the word 'recognized' surplusage, and the backup reading that the clause simply skips over ANCs is grammatically incoherent. He would have affirmed the D.C. Circuit's unanimous ruling that ANCs are not tribal governments.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began with the plain text of ISDA's 'Indian tribe' definition, which has three parts: a list of entities that may qualify (tribes, bands, nations, communities); an 'Alaska clause' expressly including Alaska Native villages and ANCs established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA); and a 'recognized-as-eligible clause' requiring those entities to be recognized as eligible for special federal programs for Indians.
- The Court held that ANCs satisfy the recognized-as-eligible clause through their connection to ANCSA. Because ANCSA is the only statute named in ISDA's definition, and because ANCSA gave ANCs access to tens of millions of acres of land and hundreds of millions of dollars specifically because of Alaska Natives' Indian status, eligibility for ANCSA's benefits alone is enough to clear the recognized-as-eligible hurdle — no formal government-to-government recognition needed.
- The Court rejected the opposing tribes' argument that the recognized-as-eligible clause is a term of art meaning 'federally recognized tribe.' To read a statutory phrase as a specialized term of art, a court must find it carried that specialized meaning when the law was enacted (1975). The Court found no evidence the phrase was understood that way in 1975, and the Federally Recognized Indian Tribe List Act of 1994 — the main post-ISDA source respondents cited — showed only that ANCs were excluded because they lacked government-to-government recognition, not because eligibility for federal benefits was the wrong test.
- As an independent backup, the Court reasoned that even if the recognized-as-eligible clause did require formal recognition, the grammatically cleanest reading would be that the clause simply does not apply to ANCs at all. Applying a federal-recognition requirement to ANCs — entities the statute expressly names — would produce a contextually implausible outcome: the definition's most prominent feature (explicitly including ANCs) would have zero practical effect, because ANCs could never realistically achieve the political recognition respondents demanded.
- Finally, the Court addressed one tribe's separate argument that ANCs lack a 'recognized governing body' and therefore cannot receive CARES Act funding even if they are Indian tribes. The Court held that in the ISDA context, 'recognized governing body' has long referred to a corporation's board of directors — ANCs' governing body as a matter of corporate law — and nothing in either ISDA or the CARES Act converts that phrase into an additional federal-recognition requirement.