Merrion v. Jicarilla Apache Tribe, 455 U.S. 130 (1982), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States holding that an Indian tribe has the authority to impose taxes on non-Indians that are conducting business on the reservation as an inherent power under their tribal sovereignty. Background History The Jicarilla Apache Tribe is a Native American (Indian) tribe in northwestern New Mexico on a reservation of . The reservation was established by an Executive Order of President Grover Cleveland in 1887 and clarified by the Executive Orders of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 and William Howard Taft in 1912. The tribe adopted a formal constitution under the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act, et seq. that provided for the taxation of members of the tribe and non-members of the tribe doing business on the reservation. If the tribe enacted a such tax ordinance on non-members, the ordinance had to be approved by the Secretary of the Interior. Beginning in 1953, the tribe entered into agreements with oil companies, including the plaintiffs Merrion and Bayless, to provide oil and gas leases. The leases were approved by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (now the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA) in accordance with . As was the usual practice at the time, the oil companies negotiated directly with BIA, who then presented the contracts to the tribal council. While the oil and gas was from reservation land, Merrion paid severance taxes to the state of New Mexico under the provisions of , where Congress had authorized such taxation in 1927. The leases provided for royalties to be paid to the tribe, but the BIA was lax in collecting them. In 1973, tribal attorneys wrote to the BIA to demand the collection of royalties, and after a year delay, the BIA would only state that they were "looking into it." In 1976, the BIA approved a tribal ordinance that also provided for a severance tax. This tax was set at 29 cents (U.S.) per barrel of oil and at 5 cents per million British thermal units (BTU) for natural gas. District court Merrion did not want to pay a severance tax to both New Mexico and the tribe, and filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico, along with such major companies as Atlantic Richfield (now part of BP), Getty Oil, Gulf Oil, and