Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/420

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COUNTY OF YAKIMA v. CONFEDERATED TRIBES AND BANDS OF YAKIMA NATION Opinion of the Court

Reasoning from Moe, the Yakima Nation and the United States argue that if § 6 no longer provides for plenary state jurisdiction over the owners of reservation fee lands, then it cannot support the exercise of the narrower jurisdiction asserted by Yakima County here. They concede, as they must, that in Moe the Court did not address the Burke Act proviso to § 6, which figures so prominently in Yakima County’s analysis. But real property taxes were not at issue in Moe, they argue, making the proviso irrelevant. And because a proviso can only operate within the reach of the principal provision it modifies, cf. United States v. Morrow, 266 U. S. 531, 534–535 (1925), neither the language of § 6 proper nor the proviso can be considered effective after Moe. We think this view rests upon a misunderstanding of Moe and a misperception of the structure of the General Allotment Act. As to the former: The Tribe’s and the United States’ interpretation of our opinion in Moe reduces ultimately to the proposition that we held § 6 to have been repealed by implication. That is not supportable, however, since it is a “cardinal rule. . . that repeals by implication are not favored,” Posadas v. National City Bank, 296 U. S. 497, 503 (1936), and since we made no mention of implied repeal in our opinion. Moe was premised, instead, on the implausibility, in light of Congress’ postallotment era legislation, of Montana’s construction of § 6 that would extend the State’s in personam jurisdiction beyond the section’s literal coverage (“each and every allottee”) to include subsequent Indian owners (through grant or devise) of the allotted parcels. This approach, we said, would create a “checkerboard” pattern in which an Indian’s personal law would depend upon his parcel ownership; it would contradict “the many and complex intervening jurisdictional statutes” dealing with States’ civil and criminal jurisdiction over reservation Indians; and it would produce almost surreal administrative problems, making the applicable law of civil relations depend not upon the locus of the transaction but upon the character of the