The most controversial provisions of that statute, addressed in Ysleta, are the provisions that govern the tribes’ subjection to Texas gambling regulations. When Texas authorities decided that their state constitution did not permit that relationship, Congress restored a federal trust relationship for those tribes by passing the Restoration Act in 1987. Although almost all Native American tribes in the United States operate under a trust relationship with the federal government, those two tribes were in a trust relationship with Texas from 1968 to 1987. The problem involves the odd history of two of the three Native American tribes that remain in the state of Texas, the petitioner Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (a tiny reservation near El Paso) and the much larger Alabama-Coushatta reservation in East Texas. The answer the court gave was a stern rebuke, vitiating the plenary control that lower-court decisions had granted the state for more than a quarter of a century. Texas resolves a longstanding dispute about the ability of Texas to control gambling on the lands of two of the Native American tribes that reside there.

Wednesday’s decision in Ysleta del Sur Pueblo v.

Texas law to gamble