Yellen v. Confederated Tribes of Chehalis Reservation
The Supreme Court ruled that Alaska Native Corporations count as 'Indian tribes' under a longstanding federal law and are therefore eligible to receive a share of the $8 billion Congress reserved for tribal governments in the COVID-19 relief package.
The decision settles a split between federal appeals courts, confirms the federal government's decades-long practice of treating these corporations as tribal entities, and unlocks roughly $450 million in COVID relief funds for the corporations.
How it got here: Federally recognized tribes sued in D.C. federal court; the district court sided with the Treasury and 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 companies Congress created in 1971 to hold land and distribute settlement money to Alaska Natives — replacing the reservation system used in the rest of the country. In 2020, Congress set aside $8 billion of COVID-19 relief specifically for tribal governments. The Treasury Department determined ANCs qualified and reserved roughly $450 million for them. Several federally recognized tribes sued, arguing only tribes with formal government-to-government relationships with the United States should receive those funds.
The question before the Court
Could Alaska Native Corporations — for-profit companies Congress created to hold land and money on behalf of Alaska Natives — qualify as tribal governments and share in the $8 billion Congress set aside for tribes in the COVID-19 relief law?
The Court's answer
Yes — Alaska Native Corporations qualify as 'Indian tribes' under the federal law Congress used to define which tribal governments receive COVID-19 relief, so they are eligible to share in the $8 billion set aside for tribes.
The Court read the statutory definition at face value: Congress expressly named Alaska Native Corporations among the entities that count as Indian tribes, and that express inclusion satisfies the definition's requirement that an entity be recognized as eligible for federal programs provided to Indians. As a backup, the Court reasoned that even if ANCs failed that clause, the most sensible reading of the statute would be that the clause simply does not apply to Alaska-specific entities Congress prominently named — because excluding them by the very next clause from a definition that specifically includes them would produce an incoherent result Congress could not have intended.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
About $450 million in COVID-19 relief funds, held back while the case was litigated, can now flow to Alaska Native Corporations. The ruling also affects the corporations' eligibility under dozens of other federal laws that use the same 'Indian tribe' definition, including programs for housing, healthcare, and energy assistance that the corporations have long participated in.
What changes now
The case returns to the lower courts for further proceedings consistent with the ruling. Practically, roughly $450 million in COVID-19 relief funds reserved for Alaska Native Corporations can now be distributed. The decision also confirms ANC eligibility under other federal laws that incorporate ISDA's 'Indian tribe' definition, though the Court noted some of those statutes may have separate requirements — such as exercising regulatory authority over territory — that could still limit ANC participation on a program-by-program basis.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not open the door for other non-federally-recognized Indian groups to claim 'Indian tribe' status under ISDA; the Court stressed that ANCs are unique entities expressly named in the statute, created by Congress, and unlike any other group. The Court also expressly declined to decide whether the recognition clause functions as a term of art in statutes enacted after ISDA.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Alito
Justice Alito joined most of the majority opinion but not Parts II–A and II–B — the sections finding that ANCs satisfy ISDA's 'recognized as eligible' clause under its plain meaning and rejecting the argument that the clause is a term of art requiring formal federal recognition. He did join the Court's backup holding in Part II–C that ANCs qualify as Indian tribes even if the recognition clause applied to them in the formal sense. He did not write separately to explain his reasoning.
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
“A clause that leaps over its nearest referent to modify every other term would defy grammatical gravity and common sense alike.”The dissent's core grammatical objection to reading the recognition clause as inapplicable to Alaska Native Corporations.
Justice Gorsuch argued that the recognition clause in ISDA's 'Indian tribe' definition applies to Alaska Native Corporations just as it does to every other entity in the list, and that 'recognized' carries its established meaning in Indian law: a formal government-to-government relationship with the United States. Because no ANC has that relationship, Gorsuch would have affirmed the D.C. Circuit. He also criticized the majority's backup theory — that the clause simply skips over ANCs — as grammatically incoherent and factually unnecessary given that it was entirely plausible in 1975 that some Alaskan entities might later seek and obtain formal recognition.
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 expressly names 'Alaska Native village or regional or village corporation as defined in or established pursuant to [ANCSA]' as included entities. That express naming was the Court's first and strongest anchor — Congress does not include entities by name for no purpose.
- The definition also requires entities to be 'recognized as eligible for the special programs and services provided by the United States to Indians because of their status as Indians.' The Court found ANCs satisfy this because ANCSA — the only statute the definition names — is itself a major federal program for Alaska Natives, granting ANCs rights to tens of millions of acres of land and hundreds of millions in tax-exempt dollars precisely because of their shareholders' status as Alaska Natives.
- The federally recognized tribes argued the phrase 'recognized as eligible' is a term of art meaning only a tribe with a formal government-to-government relationship with the United States. The Court rejected this, finding no evidence that the phrase carried that specialized meaning when ISDA was enacted in 1975, and noting that the word 'recognized' is too common and context-dependent to automatically import a formal political-recognition requirement.
- As an alternative holding, the Court reasoned that even if the recognition clause did require formal government-to-government status, the right way to read the full definition would be for that clause to simply not apply to the Alaska-specific entities in the list — because reading it otherwise would permanently exclude all ANCs from a definition whose most prominent feature is that it specifically includes them, which would be contextually implausible rather than merely grammatically awkward.
- On the CARES Act's separate requirement that a 'Tribal government' have a 'recognized governing body,' the Court held this term refers to the ANC's board of directors — a corporation's ordinary governing body under corporate law — and does not add an independent federal-recognition requirement beyond what the 'Indian tribe' definition already establishes.