Cite as: 523 U. S. 696 (1998)
Syllabus
ments Westmoreland was required to pay to the State and its subdivisions. The agreement achieved, prospectively, the federal permission the Tribe had long sought. It allowed the Tribe to have an approved tax in place so that, if successful in the litigation against Montana, the Tribe could claim for itself any tax amounts Westmoreland would be ordered to pay into the District Court's registry pendente lite. It also enabled Westmoreland to avoid double taxation, and absolved the company from any tax payment obligation to the Tribe for the 1976-1982 period. In 1983, the District Court granted a motion by the Tribe and Westmoreland to deposit severance tax payments into the District Court's registry, pending resolution of the controversy over Montana's taxing authority. In 1987, the court granted the same interim relief for the gross proceeds taxes. Later that year, the United States intervened on behalf of the Tribe to protect its interests as trustee of the coal upon which Montana's taxes were levied. After trial, the District Court determined that federal law did not preempt the State's taxes on coal mined at the ceded strip. The Ninth Circuit again reversed, concluding that the taxes were both preempted by the IMLA and void for interfering with tribal self-governance. Crow Tribe v. Montana, 819 F. 2d 895, 903 (Crow II). The Court of Appeals stressed, inter alia, that the State's taxes had at least some negative impact on the marketability of the Tribe's coal. Id., at 900. This Court summarily affirmed. When the case returned to the District Court in 1988, the court ordered distribution of the funds in its registry to the United States as trustee for the Tribe. Subsequently, the United States and the Tribe filed amended complaints against Montana and Big Horn County to recover taxes paid by Westmoreland prior to the 1983 and 1987 orders directing deposits into the court's registry. Neither the Tribe nor the United States requested, as additional or alternate relief, recovery for the Tribe's actual financial losses attributable to the State's taxes.
After trial, the District Court concluded that the disgorgement remedy sought by the Tribe was not appropriate. Key to the court's decision was this Court's holding in Cotton Petroleum Corp. v. New Mexico, 490 U. S. 163, that both State and Tribe may impose severance taxes on on-reservation oil and gas production by a non-Indian lessee. Cotton Petroleum indicated that Montana's taxes on ceded strip coal were invalidated in Crow II not because the State lacked power to tax the coal at all, but because its taxes were "extraordinarily high." 490 U. S., at 186-187, n. 17. The District Court also considered that Westmoreland would not have paid coal taxes to the Tribe before 1983, for Interior Department approval was essential to allow pass-through to the company's customers. Furthermore, under the 1982 lease agreement, the
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