Opinion ID: 891574
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: Home State Status Under the UCCJEA

Text: {35} The UCCJEA amounts to a decision by our Legislature to cede common-law jurisdiction over child-custody cases to courts in other states, where those courts have taken certain prescribed steps, under certain circumstances, to assert their own jurisdiction. Important to our controversy is that tribes are to be treated as states, meaning our Legislature has decided as a policy matter that it will surrender common-law custody jurisdiction to the tribes in the same way it would to Texas, Colorado, or Virginia. Thus, if the parties here had lived on the Pueblo for six straight months prior to filing the divorce action in state district court, that court would be required under UCCJEA home-state jurisdiction rules to surrender jurisdiction to the Pojoaque Pueblo tribal court. However, the UCCJEA remains silent about whether non-Indian land should be treated as tribal land for purposes of determining the territorial scope of any particular Pueblo. The Court of Appeals assumed that Section 1151 provided guidance, a conclusion which cannot be squared with recent U.S. Supreme Court case law. But Section 1151 cannot fill in the gap here for another reason: the Legislature never said it serves such a purpose within this particular statute. The Legislature easily could have done so, and has done so in other contexts. {36} We first observe that where Congress has desired to incorporate the Section 1151 Indian country definition into civil jurisdiction statutes, to specifically indicate that non-Indian fee land may qualify as Indian land, it has done so explicitly. See Montana, 450 U.S. at 562, 101 S.Ct. 1245. (If Congress had wished to extend tribal jurisdiction to lands owned by non-Indians, it could easily have done so by incorporating in [a federal trespassing statute] the definition of `Indian country' in 18 U.S.C. § 1151....). Many statutes and regulations explicitly apply Section 1151 to define Indian territory. See, e.g., Hydro Res., Inc. v. EPA, 562 F.3d 1249, 1258 (10th Cir.2009) (noting that 40 C.F.R. § 144.3, a portion of an underground water protection regulation, defines Indian lands as Indian country as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 1151 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)). The most telling example for present purposes is the Indian Child Welfare Act, which explicitly defines reservation as Indian country as defined in section 1151.... 25 U.S.C. § 1903(10) (2000). {37} Like Congress, our Legislature has also used the term Indian country to define the scope of Indian lands. See, e.g., NMSA 1978, § 27-2B-6(F)(2) (2007) (incorporating federal Social Security Act definition of Indian country for purposes of New Mexico Works Act); NMSA 1978, § 6-28-4(A) (2006) (Indian Capital Outlay); NMSA 1978, § 11-13-1 (1997, as amended) (incorporating Indian country for criminal jurisdiction for purposes of Indian Gaming Compact, 2007 Joint Resolution). It is clear that where Congress or our Legislature wishes to use the Indian country paradigm, they do so. Using common-law canons of statutory construction, we may conclude that where the Legislature did not include such a definition, it intended to exclude it. See Boudette v. Barnette, 923 F.2d 754, 757 (9th Cir.1991) ([W]hen a statute designates certain ... manners of operation, all omissions should be understood as exclusions.). In our inquiry into how to classify the fee land here, the absence of any mention of Section 1151 or Indian country from the UCCJEA may not be dispositive, but it is persuasive evidence that the fee land at issue here cannot be considered part of the home state of the Pojoaque Pueblo within the meaning of the statute.