268
Opinion of the Court
and from parcel to parcel. For reasons of practicality, as well as text, we adhere to our per se approach.
B
We think the excise tax on sales of fee land is another matter, as did the Court of Appeals. While the Burke Act proviso does not purport to describe the entire range of in rem jurisdiction States may exercise with respect to fee-patented reservation land, we think it does describe the entire range of jurisdiction to tax. And that description is "taxation of . . . land." Yakima County seeks to expand this text by citing our statement in Squire v. Capoeman, 351 U. S. 1 (1956), to the effect that "[t]he literal language of the [Burke Act] proviso evinces a congressional intent to subject an Indian allotment to all taxes" after it has been patented in fee. Id., at 7-8 (emphasis added). This dictum was addressed, however, to the United States' assertion that the General Allotment Act barred only States and localities, and not the Federal Government, from levying taxes on Indian allotments during the trust period. "All taxes," in the sense of federal as well as local, in no way expands the text beyond "taxation of . . . land."
It does not exceed the bounds of permissible construction to interpret "taxation of land" as including taxation of the proceeds from sale of land; and it is even true that such a construction would be fully in accord with Goudy's emphasis upon the consequences of alienability, which underlay the Burke Act proviso. That is surely not, however, the phrase's unambiguous meaning—as is shown by the Washington Supreme Court's own observation that "a tax upon the sale of property is not a tax upon the subject matter of that sale." Mahler v. Tremper, 40 Wash. 2d 405, 409, 243 P. 2d 627, 629 (1952). It is quite reasonable to say, in other words, that though the object of the sale here is land, that does not make land the object of the tax, and hence does not
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