04/13/2026
Professor Grant Christensen and his co-author, Andrew Appleby (Tennessee), posted their newest Article, “Taxing Indigenous Cultural Property,” on SSRN. The Article, forthcoming in the BYU Law Review, examines the value of cultural property that cannot legally be sold and asks whether federal or state governments should be taxing it at all. Using recent disputes over the taxation of culturally significant property as a point of departure, the article argues that Indigenous cultural property should be exempt from federal and state taxation and instead regulated, if at all, by Tribal Nations themselves. More broadly, the piece situates tax law within questions of tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and the federal government’s obligations to Native communities, and it suggests that non-tribal taxation of Indigenous cultural patrimony is inconsistent with both sound tax policy and the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Tribal Nations. Download and read the Article here:
What is the value of something that cannot legally be sold? This question lies at the heart of a growing tension between federal tax policy and Indigen
