Opinion ID: 891574
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: History of the Fee Land

Text: {38} The history and nature of the fee land here further aids our inquiry into how this land should be classified for purposes of UCCJEA home-state jurisdiction. First, the record discloses that Wife's father pays property taxes to Santa Fe County. It is axiomatic in Indian law that state taxation of Indian lands is limited. See Okla. Tax Comm'n v. Chickasaw Nation, 515 U.S. 450, 458, 115 S.Ct. 2214, 132 L.Ed.2d 400 (1995) (`[A]bsent cession of jurisdiction or other federal statutes permitting it,'... a State is without power to tax reservation lands and reservation Indians. (quoting County of Yakima v. Confederated Tribes & Bands of Yakima Indian Nation, 502 U.S. 251, 258, 112 S.Ct. 683, 116 L.Ed.2d 687 (1992))). The fact that Wife's father pays state property taxes offers insight then into the status of this land as non-Pueblo land. {39} Second, the land's history, which we summarize below, tells us that for many years, and for many purposes, it was considered neither Pueblo nor federal land, but rather private land subject to state taxation. Although the record before us now is largely silent about the fee land's history, we are confident based on this Court's treatment of the same land in Romero, 2006-NMSC-039, as well as the Court of Appeals opinion, State v. Romero, 2004-NMCA-012, 135 N.M. 53, 84 P.3d 670, that it is one of many parcels of land which the Pueblos sold during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to some 3,000 non-Indians as a result of territorial supreme court rulings, and later U.S. Supreme Court rulings, which cleared the way for Pueblos to sell their lands. See, e.g., United States v. Joseph, 94 U.S. 614, 618, 24 L.Ed. 295 (1876) ([P]ueblo Indians, [unlike other tribes], hold their lands by a right superior to that of the United States. Their title dates back to grants made by the government of Spain before the Mexican revolution ....); see also Mountain States Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Pueblo of Santa Ana, 472 U.S. 237, 243, 105 S.Ct. 2587, 86 L.Ed.2d 168 (1985) (noting that the Joseph rule permitted the sale of parcels of formerly Pueblo land, all inside Pueblo boundaries, to some 3,000 non-Indians). {40} The U.S. Supreme Court's 1913 decision in United States v. Sandoval, 231 U.S. 28, 34 S.Ct. 1, 58 L.Ed. 107 (1913), cast some doubt on the title of all these non-Indian lands, by suggesting that the Pueblos had been wrongfully dispossessed of their lands. Mountain States Tel. & Tel. Co., 472 U.S. at 243, 105 S.Ct. 2587. Congress in 1924 passed the Pueblo Lands Act (PLA) in response to these concerns. The PLA established the Pueblo Lands Board to settle issues of title to various lands within the boundaries of New Mexico's pueblos. See id. at 244-45, 105 S.Ct. 2587. Under the Board's rules, adverse possession by nonIndian claimants, coupled with the payment of taxes from 1889 to the date of enactment in 1924, or from 1902 to 1924 if possession was under color of title, sufficed to extinguish a Pueblo's title. Id. at 244, 105 S.Ct. 2587. {41} A decision by the Board to grant title of formerly Pueblo land to a non-Indian had the effect of a deed of quitclaim as against the United States and said Indians. An Act To quiet the title lands within Pueblo Indian land grants, and for other purposes. Pub.L. No. 253, 43 Stat. 637 (1924). This extinguishment of Pueblo title is important in determining the nature of non-Indian fee land within the boundaries of a Pueblo. Prior to the enactment of Section 1151 in 1948, Indian lands were judicially defined to include only those lands in which the Indians held some form of property interest.... Solem v. Bartlett, 465 U.S. 463, 468, 104 S.Ct. 1161, 79 L.Ed.2d 443 (1984). Title, for many years, was considered synonymous with territorial sovereignty, and even today governmental authority has not been completely divorced from title. Congressional passage of Section 1151 altered the direct connection between title and Indian country status, but title and civil adjudicatory authority have never been, and still are not, completely decoupled from one another. See Frickey, supra, at 1768-69 (Sovereignty connotes authority over a region and the people within it. Recent federal Indian law cases have shown a trend away from conceptualizing tribal sovereignty as including this traditional geographic component. (Footnote omitted.)). {42} Our Court of Appeals noted many of these same cases, and undertook a similar analysis, in its opinion in Romero, 2004-NMCA-012. Although we reversed that opinion, see Romero, 2006-NMSC-039, we did not take issue with the historical accuracy of the Court of Appeals' account of Pueblo land title issues, the Pueblo Lands Board, or the PLA. We merely concluded that the PLA did not provide substantial and compelling evidence of congressional intent to change Indian country status. Id. ¶ 25. {43} We agree with that conclusion. We do note, however, that in the context of today's opinion  a civil action  the PLA title determinations carry greater weight than in a criminal context, in part, because the concerns which accompany checkerboarding of title in a criminal context may not be as pivotal in a civil matter. In Seymour v. Superintendent of Washington State Penitentiary, 368 U.S. 351, 358, 82 S.Ct. 424, 7 L.Ed.2d 346 (1962), the Court noted that Indian country designation is necessary in an area where Indian and private fee land are intermingled, so as not to impose upon law enforcement of duty to search tract books in order to determine whether criminal jurisdiction over each particular offense, even though committed within the reservation, is in the State or Federal Government. In the criminal context, Section 1151's Indian country designation provides necessary homogenizing force, creating uniformity out of the sometimes chaotic jumble of land titles on, near, and within tribal boundaries. This kind of homogenization is not essential in civil cases, where concerns about time-sensitive police responses are absent, and where cases unfold on a much longer time line, and it is possible and even desirable to consult maps and tract books to determine the nature of land ownership. {44} The fee land in question here, as part of the body of land confirmed as private land by the Pueblo Lands Board, would have been subject to the foregoing legal principles about the extinguishment of Pueblo and federal title. We recognize that times, as well as the law, have changed for the better during the last 85 years, but we find it persuasive that the provenance of this fee land suggests it was understood, for many years, to be non-Pueblo land  not for criminal jurisdiction over tribal members as Congress and this Court have made clear  but in other contexts, and at least in the narrow set of civil jurisdiction circumstances outlined in the Montana line of cases. [7] {45} In sum, the text of the UCCJEA, combined with the Montana cases and the history of the non-Pueblo fee lands and the PLA, compels a conclusion that the non-Indian fee land in this case cannot be considered part of the Pueblo under the UCCJEA and under these facts. This conclusion is in keeping with the U.S. Supreme Court's evolving notion of what constitutes tribal land for purposes of civil jurisdictional authority, which, as we have seen, is highly situation-dependent. {46} As a sort of coda to our analysis, we note that our conclusion finds further support in the written opinion of the Pojoaque Pueblo court. In its Final Decree of Child Custody, Support and Visitation, the court described Wife's removal of the children to her father's house as taking the children off Pueblo lands, strongly suggesting that the Pueblo itself, or at least the Pueblo court, does not consider the fee land to be Indian territory. The court reiterated this position two paragraphs later, describing Wife's removal to her father's property as taking the children off tribal lands. Further, the court asserted jurisdiction over the child-custody, support, and visitation matters based on the parties' significant connections to this forum. While the court did not cite to either the PKPA or the UCCJEA in its decree, and we therefore cannot be certain that it intentionally adopted the language of those statutes, it appears that the court may have been conceding that it did not have home-state jurisdiction, but rather relied on significant connections jurisdiction, as does the state court.