124
Opinion of the Court
ically gave state law "no role to play" within a tribe's territorial boundaries, 411 U. S., at 168, did not provide "a definitive resolution of the issues," but it did "provid[e] a backdrop against which the applicable treaties and federal statutes must be read," id., at 172. Accord, Colville, supra, at 178- 179 (Rehnquist, J., concurring in part, concurring in result in part, and dissenting in part). Although "exemptions from tax laws should, as a general rule, be clearly expressed," McClanahan, 411 U. S., at 176, the tradition of Indian sovereignty requires that the rule be reversed when a State attempts to assert tax jurisdiction over an Indian tribe or tribal members living and working on land set aside for those members.
To determine whether a tribal member is exempt from state income taxes under McClanahan, a court first must determine the residence of that tribal member. To the extent that the Court of Appeals ruled without such a reference, it erred. The Commission, however, contends that the relevant boundary for taxing jurisdiction is the perimeter of a formal reservation, not merely land set aside for a tribe or its members. In the Commission's view, Indian sovereignty serves as a "backdrop" only for those tribal members who live on the reservation, and all others fall outside McClanahan's presumption against taxation. It is true that we began our discussion in McClanahan by emphasizing that we were not "dealing with Indians who have left or never inhabited reservations set aside for their exclusive use or who do not possess the usual accoutrements of tribal self-government." Id., at 167-168. Here, in contrast, some of the Tribe's members may not live within a reservation; indeed, if the Commission's interpretation of the 1891 Treaty is correct and the reservation was disestablished, none do.
Nonetheless, in Oklahoma Tax Comm'n v. Citizen Band of Potawatomi Tribe of Okla., we rejected precisely the same argument—and from precisely the same litigant. There the Commission contended that even if the State did not have
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