Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government et al. (522 U.S. 520)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided February 25, 1998 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 522 U.S. 520 · 118 S. Ct. 948
- Decided
- February 25, 1998
- Term
- October Term 1997
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Thomas
- Issue area
- Civil Rights
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Thomas delivered the opinion of the Court. In this ease, we must decide whether approximately 1.8 million acres of land in northern Alaska, owned in fee simple by the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government pursuant to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, is “Indian country.” We conclude that it is not, and we therefore reverse the judgment below. I The Village of Venetie, which is located in Alaska above the Arctic Circle, is home to the Neets’aii Gwieh’in Indians. In 1948, the Secretary of the Interior created a reservation for the Neets’aii Gwieh’in out of the land surrounding Venetie and another nearby tribal village, Arctic Village. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 2a. This land, which is about the size of Delaware, remained a reservation until 1971, when Congress enacted the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), a comprehensive statute designed to settle all land claims by Alaska Natives. See 85 Stat. 688, as amended, 43 U. S. C. § 1601 et seq. In enacting ANCSA, Congress sought to end the sort of federal supervision over Indian affairs that had previously marked federal Indian policy. ANCSA’s text states that the settlement of the land claims was to be accomplished “without litigation, with maximum participation by Natives in decisions affecting their rights and property, without establishing any permanent racially defined institutions, rights,…
Excerpt of a 23,494-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.