Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin v. United States

What happened

This is a money-claims case, not a land case. Under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (ISDA), the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin contracted with the Indian Health Service (IHS) to operate what would otherwise have been a federal program and to receive an amount equal to what the government would have spent, including reimbursement of contract support costs.

Tribal contractors had repeatedly complained that the federal government had not fully honored its obligation to pay those costs. The first relevant lawsuit was a class action filed in 1990 by the Ramah Navajo Chapter, in which the trial court held that tribes could take part in the class without first presenting claims to a contracting officer. A second suit, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma v. United States, was filed against IHS in 1999.

The Menominee Tribe then presented its own claims to IHS under the Contract Disputes Act of 1978. The contracting officer denied some of them because they were not presented within the Act's time limit. The Tribe argued that the limit should be tolled for the nearly two years in which a putative class action by other tribes was pending.

The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Alito for a unanimous Court, held that equitable tolling does not apply. A litigant must show both that he has been pursuing his rights diligently and that some extraordinary circumstance stood in his way. The Court called these "elements," not factors in a unitary test, and found no extraordinary circumstance beyond the Tribe's control.

Summarized with AI assistance from 3 sources and checked against their words; not yet reviewed by historians or by the nations. Report an error