Riyaz Kanji

Riyaz Kanji represents tribal nations in disputes over land, natural resources, gaming, and the authority of tribal, state, and federal governments. He examines treaty text, historical relationships, and congressional action to enforce the United States’ commitments to Native nations and the sovereignty those nations retain.

Kanji graduated from Harvard College in 1986 and Yale Law School in 1991, where he won the Potter Stewart Prize in moot court. He clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit and Justice David Souter at the Supreme Court, then spent two years as a Skadden Fellow at Evergreen Legal Services in Seattle, working on treaty shellfishing litigation for Northwest tribes under the nineteenth-century Stevens Treaties. After several years at Williams & Connolly in Washington, he co-founded Kanji & Katzen to represent tribal nations. The firm has offices in Ann Arbor and Seattle.

McGirt and the Muscogee Reservation

As lead counsel for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in litigation from Carpenter v. Murphy to McGirt v. Oklahoma, Kanji addressed whether Congress had disestablished the Nation’s reservation, whose boundaries were set in 1866. Oklahoma had treated it as disestablished for a century. Kanji argued from statute and history that allotment had divided the land without an act of Congress dissolving the reservation. In May 2020, during the Supreme Court’s first season of telephonic arguments, he argued the Nation’s position. That July, the Court held that the Muscogee reservation in eastern Oklahoma remained Indian country for purposes of the Major Crimes Act.

The Court required congressional action to disestablish the reservation; demographic change and the passage of time could not substitute for it. Kanji described counsel’s work as telling the truth about the Nation’s existing governance of land it had never lawfully lost.

Salmon, Culverts, and a Treaty’s Plumbing

As co-counsel for western Washington tribes in the culverts phase of United States v. Washington, Kanji helped enforce the Stevens Treaties’ guarantee of the right to take fish. State-maintained culverts, the channels carrying streams beneath roads, blocked salmon from hundreds of miles of habitat and diminished the runs on which the treaty right depends. The tribes won a ruling protecting the fish runs needed to exercise that right, along with access to fishing grounds. The Ninth Circuit’s judgment stood after the Supreme Court divided evenly in 2018. The remedy requires Washington to correct hundreds of barrier culverts through a multiyear construction program.

Jurisdiction in Tribal Courts and on Tribal Land

As lead counsel in Kelsey v. Pope, Kanji won the first federal appellate decision upholding a tribe’s criminal jurisdiction over its own members outside Indian country, grounded in the inherent sovereignty that predates the United States. For the Seneca Nation, he served as lead counsel in Citizens Against Casino Gambling in Erie County v. Chaudhuri, in which the Second Circuit affirmed the Indian-country status of Nation lands in Buffalo and the legality of its gaming facility.

Kanji was also co-counsel for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, where the federal courts allowed a civil tort claim against a non-Indian business operating on tribal trust land to proceed in tribal court. The Supreme Court divided evenly in 2016, leaving the Fifth Circuit judgment in favor of tribal-court jurisdiction in place.

Great Lakes Co-Management

Kanji returned to Great Lakes treaty litigation as counsel of record for four respondent tribes defending the 2023 Great Lakes Fishing Decree. The decree governs commercial, subsistence, and sport fishing in treaty waters of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior and emerged from negotiations among tribal, federal, and state sovereigns over how to protect treaty-reserved fishing rights while conserving a stressed fishery. In March 2025, the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court’s authority to enter the decree over the objection of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe.

When the Sault Tribe sought Supreme Court review, Kanji and his colleagues filed the joint tribal brief in opposition for the Bay Mills Indian Community, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, and Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. On January 12, 2026, the Supreme Court denied review, leaving the Sixth Circuit judgment and the 2023 decree in place.

A Firm Built for Nations

As a principal advisor to the Tribal Supreme Court Project, Kanji helps coordinate strategy across tribal litigation, including which cases reach the Court and how the issues are presented. He played an active role in the Project’s formation and has devoted hundreds of hours of pro bono time to its work. He has also taught Native American law at the University of Michigan.