Ninth Circuit Weighs Koi Nation's Shiloh Casino After Graton Win
Three findings by a district judge brought the Sonoma County project down. The appeal has to survive all of them.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard argument on Sept. 1 in the consolidated appeals over Koi Nation of Northern California's proposed Shiloh Resort and Casino, the most consequential land-into-trust dispute now pending in California tribal gaming. The session, held at the James R. Browning Courthouse in San Francisco, was allotted twenty minutes per side. No ruling was announced.
The panel consisted of Circuit Judges Jay Bybee and Daniel Bress, joined by U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver of Arizona, sitting by designation. Neal Katyal argued for the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, telling the panel the matter should return to the Department of the Interior to go through the land-into-trust process again with a properly authorized official signing off. Hagan Scotten argued for Koi Nation, whose position is that the lawsuit should not have proceeded as it did.
How the case reached the Ninth Circuit
The dispute concerns a 68.6-acre parcel in Sonoma County known as the Shiloh Parcel. Graton Rancheria filed suit in November 2024 alleging that Interior failed to conduct meaningful consultation under the National Historic Preservation Act. In January 2025, Interior took the parcel into trust for Koi Nation and determined that gaming could be authorized there under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Graton filed a second suit the following month challenging both determinations, then a supplemental complaint in March 2025; the district court consolidated the cases.
Cross-motions for summary judgment followed in the spring of 2025. On Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin ruled for Graton Rancheria on several major claims. On Sept. 30, 2025, the court entered final judgment vacating the challenged Record of Decision and the gaming eligibility determination and remanding to Interior. That judgment, and the procedural rulings surrounding Koi Nation's intervention, produced the consolidated appeals and a cross-appeal now before the Ninth Circuit. The district court outcome and its immediate consequences were covered here when the trust decision was vacated.
The three findings the appeal has to survive
Judge Lin's order rested on three distinct conclusions, and that structure shapes what the appellate panel is being asked to do. First, the court found Interior's consultation under the National Historic Preservation Act inadequate. Second, it found that the department improperly determined Koi Nation had the significant historical connection required to qualify under IGRA's restored-lands exception. Third, it found that the federal decision was executed by an official who lacked valid delegated authority.
Each defect carries a different remedial weight. A signature-authority problem is, in principle, curable by re-executing the decision at the right level. A consultation defect requires process to be redone but not necessarily a different outcome. The historical-connection finding is the hardest of the three, because it goes to eligibility itself: if the parcel does not satisfy the restored-lands exception, there is no path to Class III gaming on it regardless of how carefully the paperwork is redone. Overturning one finding does not revive the project if another stands.
What a ruling would and would not settle
Public attention centers on whether the casino gets built, but the questions actually before the panel include substantial procedural matters. The Ninth Circuit's calendar identifies intervention, dismissal and the disputed trust transaction as subjects of the consolidated appeals. One component is Koi Nation's appeal from an order that granted its motion to intervene while denying its motion to dismiss — a ruling that let the tribe participate directly without ending Graton's case.
That means the panel's eventual decision may determine which claims survive, which parties may press them, and what happens when the matter returns to district court, without resolving the merits of the development dispute. Appellate rulings on threshold questions routinely set the direction of a case without deciding it.
Meanwhile the commercial clock keeps running. Koi Nation said in April that it is building tribal offices on the vineyard land, an assertion of presence on a parcel whose trust status has been vacated. Graton Resort and Casino, roughly twenty minutes away, is in the second phase of a billion-dollar expansion. Whatever the Ninth Circuit decides lands in a Sonoma County market that has already absorbed significant new capacity, and in a state where fee-to-trust outcomes increasingly turn on litigation rather than administrative review. California's broader picture is tracked in our California state hub.
The case also illustrates a pattern that has become characteristic of off-reservation gaming disputes: the most effective opposition comes from other tribes. Graton Rancheria is not a competitor in the commercial sense alone; it is a federally recognized government with its own historical claims in the same territory, and its arguments about consultation and historical connection are arguments about whose history the federal record credits.
No timetable governs when the panel must rule. Ninth Circuit decisions in Indian land cases have taken anywhere from a few months to more than a year. Until then, the Shiloh Parcel remains outside trust, the gaming determination remains vacated, and one of California's most closely watched tribal gaming projects remains unresolved.