## Facts

- Native Americans from the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa tribes used the Chimney Rock/“High Country” area of the Six Rivers National Forest for longstanding religious practices requiring privacy, silence, and an undisturbed natural setting.
- The U.S. Forest Service approved plans to build a segment of the Gasquet–Orleans road through the area and to permit related timber harvesting.
- A government-commissioned study concluded the projects would cause grave harm to the tribes’ religious practices and recommended not completing the road through the area.
- The Forest Service rejected that recommendation, selected a route intended to reduce impacts on identified sites, and adopted a timber plan with protective zones around recognized religious locations.
- Tribal members and supporting organizations sued, alleging that the projects would effectively destroy conditions necessary for their religious exercise.

## Issues

1. Whether the Free Exercise Clause prohibits the federal government from building a road and allowing timber harvesting on federal land when the projects will severely impair, and may effectively eliminate, religious practices tied to that land.
2. Whether the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 (AIRFA) creates judicially enforceable rights or a cause of action to block federal land-use decisions that harm Native religious practices.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit in a 5–3 decision authored by Justice O’Connor.
- The Court held that the road construction and timber harvesting plan did not violate the Free Exercise Clause, despite severe adverse effects on the respondents’ religious practices.
- The Court held that AIRFA creates no cause of action and confers no judicially enforceable rights.
- The injunction against the federal projects could not be sustained on the Free Exercise Clause or AIRFA grounds.

## Legal Principles

- Government action that substantially diminishes the ability to practice religion does not violate the Free Exercise Clause where it does not coerce individuals to violate their beliefs, impose sanctions, deny benefits, or discriminate based on religion.
- The Free Exercise Clause does not grant religious adherents a veto over the government’s management and use of its own land when the government is not regulating religious conduct.
- AIRFA is a policy directive for agency consideration of Native religious practices and does not supply enforceable substantive rights or an independent basis for judicial relief.

## Conclusion

The Court held that the federal government may proceed with neutral land-management decisions on its property even if those decisions have severe, practice-ending effects on site-based Native religions, and it rejected AIRFA as a source of enforceable rights or a cause of action.


Lyng v. Nw. Indian Cemetery Protective Ass'n, 485 U.S. 439 (1988)