When the US Supreme Court interprets the US Constitution is it sometimes, in effect, making new laws. Is such "activism" on the part of the Supreme Court part of its job?

YES; Is  Active activism

Explanation:

Behind every method of interpretation in the North American system, it is important to talk about its relationship with the democratic exercise. Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, in his work on the relationship of control between public powers in the North American system, explains that to a large extent the methods of legal interpretation have their origin in the distribution of sovereign power from the nation to citizens and are themselves an exercise of freedom as a principle of the legal system, as they are exercised by citizens (judges, litigants) who end up being part of the system. This relationship of participation in the understanding of written norms, which involves citizens every day and which correlates in the exercise of the right to the people and their rulers, is called active freedom, and it is, in turn, an open invitation to the citizenship to interpret their own constitution. According to active freedom, the institutions and methods of interpretation must be conceived to be durable as doctrinal institutions, but at the same time, to be able to translate the will of the people, which is changing according to the circumstances of the moment, through its policies. and its judicial decisions.

The justification for the democratization of the methods of interpretation involves several debates on the so-called “legal evolutions”, such as those occasions when traditional institutions are forced to change by evolutions and social demands.

The American liberal conception of evolving legal institutions considers that allowing the legal interpretation to modify old notions of law according to social demands is a democratic objective

as general terms,  indian territory,  the indian territories, or  indian country  describe an evolving land area set aside by the  united states government  for the relocation of  native americans  who held  aboriginal title  to their land. in general, the tribes ceded land they occupied in exchange for  land grants  in 1803. the concept of an indian territory was an outcome of the 18th- and 19th-century policy of  indian removal. after the  civil war(1861–1865), the policy of the government was one of  assimilation.