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32 the Indian Commerce Clause. That error sent this Court’s Indian-law jurisprudence into a tailspin from which it has only recently begun to recover. Understanding that error—and the steps this Court has taken to correct it—are the last missing pieces of the puzzle.

In 1885, during the period of assimilationist federal policy, Congress enacted the Indian Major Crimes Act, §9, 23 Stat. 385. Among other things, that law extended federal-court jurisdiction over various crimes committed by Indians against Indians on tribal lands. Ibid. In United States v. Kagama, 118 U. S. 375 (1886), this Court upheld the constitutionality of that Act. In the process, though, it stepped off the doctrinal trail. Instead of examining the text and history of the Indian Commerce Clause, the Court offered a free-floating and purposivist account of the Constitution, describing it as extending broad “power [to] the General Government” over tribal affairs. Id., at 384. Building on that move, the Court would later come to describe the federal power over the Tribes as “plenary.” See, e.g., Winton v. Amos, 255 U. S. 373, 391 (1921); Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U. S. 553, 565 (1903).

Perhaps the Court meant well. Surely many of its so-called “plenary power” cases reached results explainable under a proper reading of the Constitution’s enumerated powers. Maybe the turn of phrase even made some sense: Congress’s power with regard to the Tribes is “plenary” in that it leaves no room for State involvement. See Ablavsky 2015, at 1014 (“[T]he Court use[d] the term [plenary] interchangeably with ‘exclusive’ ”). But as sometimes happens when this Court elides text and original meaning in favor of broad pronouncements about the Constitution’s purposes, the plenary-power idea baked in the prejudices of the day. Cf. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896). The Court suggested that the federal government’s total power over the Tribes derived from its supposedly inherent right to “enforce its laws” over “th[e] remnants of a race once powerful,