McGirt v. Oklahoma: When Half a State Turned Out to Still Be Indian Land

In July of twenty twenty, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling that most Americans did not notice, because the country was in the middle of a pandemic and a political upheaval, and the ruling was about criminal jurisdiction in eastern Oklahoma.

What the ruling said was this: the original boundaries of the Creek Nation's reservation in eastern Oklahoma had never been legally disestablished. Congress had allotted the land, enrolled the tribal members, and dismantled the tribal government through the Curtis Act of eighteen ninety-eight. Oklahoma had been admitted to statehood in nineteen oh seven. For one hundred and twelve years, the state of Oklahoma had exercised criminal jurisdiction over the roughly three million acres of what had been Creek Nation territory.

The Supreme Court ruled, five to four, that none of this had extinguished the reservation. The reservation still existed as a matter of federal law, and therefore crimes committed on that land by or against Native Americans fell under federal jurisdiction, not state jurisdiction.

The case was McGirt v. Oklahoma. It turned on treaty language from eighteen thirty-three, words the federal government and the state of Oklahoma had spent more than a century treating as obsolete. The ruling affected not just the Creek Nation but the five major Oklahoma tribes, extending across roughly half of the state.

This is the most significant legal recognition of Indigenous land rights in American history in a generation. It did not transfer land ownership. It did not remove non-Native Oklahomans from their homes and properties. What it established is that the treaty promises made to these nations, promises violated and then treated as dead for over a century, had in law never been extinguished.

The Creek Nation, which calls itself the Muscogee Nation, is headquartered in Okmulgee. That is where you are now.