Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1484_aplc.pdf
Page Number: 19.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

3 

THOMAS, J., concurring 

U. S., at 296–297; see also Cobell v. Norton, 240 F. 3d 1081, 
1086  (CADC  2001);  Shoshone  Indian  Tribe  of  Wind  River 
Reservation v. United States, 364 F. 3d 1339, 1348 (CA Fed. 
2004).

In United States v. Jicarilla Apache Nation, 564 U. S. 162 
(2011), the Court took steps to rectify this confusion.  There, 
we explained that the Federal Government is “not a private 
trustee” but a “sovereign,” id., at 173–174, and that “[t]he 
Government assumes Indian trust responsibilities only to 
the extent it expressly accepts those responsibilities by stat-
ute,” id., at 177.  Accordingly, any legal trusts established
or duties self-imposed by the Government for a tribe’s ben-
efit are “defined and governed by statutes rather than the 
common law.”  Id., at 174; see also id., at 173 (emphasizing 
that “ ‘[t]he general relationship between the United States
and the Indian tribes is not comparable to a private trust
relationship’ ”).  The Court’s opinion today represents a step
in the same direction, making clear that tribes’ legal claims 
against  the  Government  must  be  based  on  specific  provi-
sions of positive law, not merely an amorphous “trust rela-
tionship.”

However, the Court has also invoked the “trust relation-
ship” to shape at least two other areas of its Indian-law ju-
risprudence—with questionable results.  For example, the
Court  has  identified  “the  unique  trust  relationship”  with
the Indians as the source of pro-Indian “canons of construc-
tion” that are supposedly “applicable [only] in Indian law.” 
County  of  Oneida  v.  Oneida  Indian  Nation  of  N.  Y.,  470 
U. S. 226, 247 (1985); see also EEOC v. Karuk Tribe Hous-
ing Auth., 260 F. 3d 1071, 1081 (CA9 2001) (refusing to ap-
ply the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 to 
tribes in part because of those canons).  But it is far from 
clear how such a trust relationship would support different 
interpretive tools.  The first cases to apply those pro-Indian 
canons did not ground them in any “trust relationship,” but
in  the  more  basic  idea  that  ambiguous  treaty  provisions