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WAGNON v. PRAIRIE BAND POTAWATOMI NATION Opinion of the Court
from placing the legal incidence of an excise tax “on a tribe or on tribal members for sales made inside Indian country” without congressional authorization, id., at 459 (emphasis added). We have further determined that, even when a State imposes the legal incidence of its tax on a non-Indian seller, the tax may nonetheless be pre-empted if the trans action giving rise to tax liability occurs on the reservation and the imposition of the tax fails to satisfy the Bracker interest-balancing test. See 448 U. S. 136 (holding that state taxes imposed on on-reservation logging and hauling operations by non-Indian contractor are invalid under the interest-balancing test); cf. Central Machinery Co. v. Ari zona Tax Comm’n, 448 U. S. 160 (1980) (holding that the Indian trader statutes pre-empted Arizona’s tax on a nonIndian seller’s on-reservation sales). The Nation maintains that it is entitled to prevail under the categorical bar articulated in Chickasaw because “[t]he fairest reading of the statute is that the legal incidence of the tax actually falls on the Tribe [on the reservation].” Brief for Respondent 17, n. 5. The Nation alternatively maintains it is entitled to prevail even if the legal incidence of the tax is on the non-Indian distributor because, according to the Nation, the tax arises out of a distributor’s on reservation transaction with the Tribe and is therefore sub ject to the Bracker balancing test. Brief for Respondent 15. We address the “who” and the “where” of Kansas’ motor fuel tax in turn. A Kansas law specifies that “the incidence of [the motor fuel] tax is imposed on the distributor of the first receipt of the motor fuel.” Kan. Stat. Ann. § 79–3408(c) (2003 Cum. Supp.). We have suggested that such “dispositive language” from the state legislature is determinative of who bears the legal incidence of a state excise tax. Chickasaw, supra, at 461. But even if the state legislature had not employed such “dispositive language,” thereby requiring us instead to look
