Mashpee Tribe v. Town of Mashpee

The Mashpee Tribe (plaintiff) historically held land in common in what became the Town of Mashpee, Massachusetts, but an 1842 act allocated 60-acre lots to individual tribal members, and in 1869 Massachusetts granted all Indians, including the Mashpee, full citizenship and the right to freely sell land. Over the following century, individual tribal members sold portions of that land to developers, gradually shrinking the tribe's holdings and eroding its members' access to traditional hunting and fishing grounds. In the 1970s, the Mashpee sued the town under the Nonintercourse Act, which bars conveying tribal land except by federal treaty, but the town disputed whether the Mashpee still qualified as a "tribe" under the Act, and a jury reviewed the tribe's status at several key historical points and found it was not a tribe under the Act; the town moved to dismiss.