Title: Landmark Supreme Court Ruling Affirms Native American Rights in Oklahoma - The New York Times
Headings: Landmark Supreme Court Ruling Affirms Native American Rights in Oklahoma
Landmark Supreme Court Ruling Affirms Native American Rights in Oklahoma
A New Map of Oklahoma
How the court ruled

Content: Mr. McGirt argued that Congress had created the reservation and had never clearly destroyed the sovereignty of the Creek Nation over the area, even as much of the land was parceled off to private ownership. Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, tracing that history, began: “ On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.” The reference is to the forced relocation of some 100,000 Native Americans from their home in the Southeast in the 1800s. The opinion said that the promise was that Congress had guaranteed the Creek land for a permanent home in what became Oklahoma in exchange for forcing them from their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama during the 1830s. The court was faced with the question of whether lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had remained a reservation after Oklahoma became a state and the tribe’s lands were fractured and sold off and its powers of self-governance were attacked by Congress. Some Indigenous activists and lawyers said they were not surprised that Justice Gorsuch had broken with his fellow conservatives. On the court, he had provided the pivotal vote in favor of Indigenous rights in cases dealing with a Native American cited for illegal hunting in Wyoming, and about fuel taxes imposed on a business owned by a member of the Yakama Nation. “Reading it, the understanding of what has happened to our people was nice to see acknowledged at this level of the government,” said Sarah Deer, a lawyer and a professor at the University of Kansas, who is also a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. “ It’s not something we’ve seen from the court very often.