How Tribal Nations Are Reclaiming Oklahoma
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
One day in the summer of 2020, Chuck Hoskin, Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, and his daughter were driving through Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the location of the Cherokee Nation headquarters. Hoskin, who is forty-nine, had grown up understanding that he was a citizen of one of the country’s largest tribal nations in terms of population—there are nearly half a million enrolled Cherokee citizens—yet one of its smallest in terms of territory. But that had just changed. In McGirt v. Oklahoma, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a nineteenth-century treaty between the Muscogee Creek Nation and the U.S. was still in effect. The 5–4 decision ultimately resulted in the restoration of land to eight tribes and the conclusion that nearly half of Oklahoma, including most of the city of Tulsa, seventy miles northwest of Tahlequah, was tribal territory. As Hoskin drove through Tahlequah’s quiet streets—past its antique stores and strip-mall plazas, its billboards advertising well drilling and Narcan and Jesus—the familiar town was made new with the realization that his daughter would grow up in a world where all of this was part of the Cherokee reservation.
The McGirt case represented an enormous and long-awaited restoration of sovereignty, “the ability of a group of people to manage their own affairs,” as Hoskin put it. In Indian Country, which is the legal term for land reserved for tribes, tribal nations have authority over their citizens—they can adjudicate legal cases, levy taxes, and impose municipal regulations. But, in Oklahoma, which apart from Alaska has the nation’s highest proportion of Native residents, the state had long maintained that reservations—and, thus, much tribal authority—had ceased to exist in 1907, with statehood. Now two million Oklahomans—some of them tribal citizens, most of them not—were living on a reservation.
The decision was a surprise in part because the U.S. has typically taken a paternalistic approach to tribal nations. Until 1970, the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Muscogee Creek, and Choctaw Nations—weren’t allowed to elect their own chiefs. McGirt specifically applied to criminal jurisdiction, meaning that, in towns like Tahlequah and in cities like Tulsa, the tribes, and their federal partners, now had policing and prosecutorial authority over tribal citizens. The recognition of the tribe’s expanded rights offered the Cherokee Nation an opportunity to approach criminal justice differently—by integrating tribal conceptions of restorative justice into proceedings, say, or by treating crimes that stem from addiction differently. (Overdose fatalities among American Indians are higher than Oklahoma’s average.) The Court’s ruling also made it conceivable that tribal authority could eventually extend to other spheres: taxation, zoning, regulation.
But McGirt came at a fraught time for Oklahoma’s tribal nations. The state’s governor, Kevin Stitt, is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation; he is also emphatically opposed to tribal interests, which he sees as divisive. Stitt, a Republican, has called the idea that eastern Oklahoma is a reservation under tribal jurisdiction “preposterous” and “un-American” and “super weird.” In the months leading up to the Court’s decision, he predicted chaos and breakdowns in law and order if the Justices ruled in favor of the tribes. He later called McGirt “the biggest issue that’s ever hit any state since the Civil War.” The tension between the Governor and the tribes has continued to ratchet up. “This particular governor is looking at it like, McGirt is an attack on my state, we’re almost at war,” Hoskin said. “Not a shooting war, but almost like enemy camps.”
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One of the larger take-offs of the McGirt decision is that the decision has enticed other Nations/Tribes to conduct thorough research into their treaties to ensure that the boundaries placed on them through treaties may still exceed what state and Fed governments are ignoring - those tribes/Nations still retain rights to those lands.
OK may be in for more shocks...
Sitt the Apple or ''Around the Fort Indian'' is a good match for a Mark Mullen.
Not only OK. MT, ID, ND, SD and NE Nations/Tribes have gathered their "Treaty Experts", NARF and NCAI to do the digging, and there's already "rumors" that the flood gates are getting ready to bust open.
I'm waiting on the Northeast Nations/Tribes to start issuing their claims. Read something the other day that the Shinnecock have taken the advanced steps to regaining some of their properties. Maybe Perrie could update us.
I read that too.
Believe it was/is something like 'bout 1,500 acres?
I hope the nations/tribes get every advance they deserve. its about time.
John - this is what has always bothered me - and plenty of others. Why does/can the Fed government totally close their eyes/ears to the legalities that they are so intently violating - legal issues that they won't/don't break/bypass with other nations/countries?
You had a thread once 'bout how "Dominant Society", because they are so populous and, also the fact that they are the majority in the ruling power, just do what they please, regardless of what the laws dictate. Remember?
Is that still in play today, and if so, is there a means to curtail those actions?
I have said here, a number of times, that I think America has been slow to redress Native American grievances and aspirations because Native Americans havent had an effective "public relations" ( for lack of a better term) campaign to create universal awareness of American Indian issues. That seems to be changing the past few years, if very slowly.
I think there are two reasons for this lack of awareness. One, the American Indian population is very small compared to other ethnicities, and , two, American Indians , in some places have some form of local self-government which unfortunately allows the larger society to see them as at least somewhat 'separate' from themselves.
Looking forward to more land being returned to the tribes. It's taken long enough.
In the last two years 11,000 plus acres have been returned to the Leech Lake Ojibwa and another 22,000 acres to the Bois du Fort Ojibwa in MN. There is a bill in the MN assembly to return 160,000 acres to the White Earth Ojibwa. The Fond du Lac band of Ojibwa got 1500 acres of Lak Superior waterfront back and the Bad River Ojibwa also got land back