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Rh ICWA lacks any foothold in the Constitution’s original meaning. Most obviously, ICWA has no parallel from the Founding era; it regulates the child custody proceedings of U. S. citizens in state courts—not on Indian lands—merely because the children involved happen to be Indians. No law from that time even came close to asserting a general police power over citizens who happened to be Indians—by, for example, regulating the acts of Indians who were also citizens and who lived within the sole jurisdiction of States (and not on Indian lands). If nothing else, the dearth of Founding-era laws even remotely similar to ICWA should give us pause.

Nor can ICWA find any support in the Constitution’s enumerated powers as originally understood. I take those powers in turn: First, the Property Clause cannot support ICWA because ICWA is not based on the disposition of federal property and is not limited to federal lands; in fact, the Federal Government owns very little Indian land. See Statistical Record of Native North Americans 1054 (M. Reddy ed. 1993); S. Prakash, Against Tribal Fungibility, 89 Cornell L. Rev. 1069, 1092–1093 (2004).

Second, the Treaty Clause cannot support ICWA because no one has identified a treaty that governs child custody proceedings—much less a treaty with each of the 574 federally recognized tribes to which ICWA applies. 25 U. S. C. §§§ [sic]1903(3), (8); 86 Fed. Reg. 7554 (2021). Nor could they; Congress declared an end to treaty-making with Indian tribes in 1871, and it appears that well over half of the tribes lack any treaty with the Federal Government. See 16 Stat. 566; Brief for Tribal Defendants 37–38; see also generally Vols. 1–2 C. Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (2d ed. 1902, 1904). And, in part because one Congress can never bind a later Congress, the Federal Government retains the power to abrogate treaties and has done so for at least some Indian treaties. E.g., Lone Wolf, 187