The National Labor Relations Board has long maintained that the NLRA applies to non-tribal-owned businesses operating on reservations. These principles give rise to the question of how courts should construe the scope of federal statutes of broad and general application that, like the NLRA, are silent regarding their application to tribes. Also well established is Congress's ability to legislate for Indian Country and to extinguish these rights by expressing a clear and unambiguous intent to do so. It is a touchstone principle of federal Indian law that tribes, as quasi-sovereign nations, possess the inherent right to self-govern, generally to the exclusion of state and federal laws. These decisions are among the latest in a recent, rapid shift in the law towards applying the NLRA to businesses on tribal lands. NLRB (July 1, 2015), another Sixth Circuit panel held that the NLRA applied to a casino owned and operated by the tribe on trust lands within the reservation, notwithstanding the tribe's inherent sovereignty and a treaty-based right to exclude. Less than a month later, in Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort v. Little River Band of Ottawa Indians Tribal Government, a Sixth Circuit panel concluded that the inherent sovereignty possessed by the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians did not preclude the NLRA's application to a tribe-owned casino on tribal trust land. Recently, two Sixth Circuit decisions resolved the question in favor of the Act's application to tribal casinos.

The extent of the National Labor Relations Act's application to tribal-owned and operated enterprises on reservations is an open question in many circuits.

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