Same-sex marriage under United States tribal jurisdictions

The Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage in the states and most territories did not legalize same-sex marriage on Indian lands. In the United States, Congress (not the federal courts) has legal authority over Indian country. Thus, unless Congress passes a law regarding same-sex marriage for Indian tribes, federally recognized American Indian tribes have the legal right to form their own marriage laws. As such, the individual laws of the various United States federally recognized Native American tribes set the limits on same-sex marriage under their jurisdictions.

Most, but not all, Native American jurisdictions have no special regulation for marriages between people of the same sex or gender. Many Native American belief systems include the two-spirit descriptor for gender variant individuals and accept two-spirited individuals as valid members of their tribes. Same-sex marriage is possible in at least 37 Native American tribes, beginning with the Coquille Indian Tribe (Oregon) in 2009. Marriages performed in these Native American tribes were first recognized by the Federal Government in 2013 after section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was declared unconstitutional in United States v. Windsor.

In some instances tribal law has been changed to specifically address same-sex marriage. In other cases, tribal law specifies that state law and state jurisdiction govern marriage relations for the tribal jurisdiction.

The Law and Order Code of the Blackfeet Nation of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana, Chapter 3 - Domestic Relations specifies that state law and state jurisdiction governs marriage relations and that neither common-law nor marriages performed under native customs are valid within the Blackfeet Reservation. On November 19, 2014, US District Court Judge Brian Morris struck down Montana's same-sex marriage ban in Rolando v. Fox. In December 2007, a traditional Blackfoot marriage ceremony was held in Seeley Lake, Montana for a Blackfoot two-spirit couple.

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