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 ten 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.”
Hoskin, who has a Plains twang and good country manners, is from a well-connected political family; his father served in both tribal and state governments. “My goodness, I don’t know what the universe had in mind when it decided that McGirt would happen with someone as governor who really fundamentally does not believe there’s a role for tribes,” he told me, when I visited him in his office at the Cherokee headquarters this summer.
The office had bright-blue walls and shelves lined with ceramic bowls and tightly woven baskets—Hoskin’s collection of work by contemporary Cherokee artists. Hanging on the wall was a prize possession, which he bought at auction a few years ago: a map of tribal territory from 1906, the year before Oklahoma became a state, showing the Cherokee Nation extending from the Arkansas River, in the south, up to the Kansas border. When European settlers began to arrive in North America, the Cherokee Nation stretched throughout southern Appalachia. By the nineteenth century, the growing white population was “sick with the expectation of Indian land,” one Cherokee leader wrote. White people encroached on tribal territory, and eventually the tribe was forcibly displaced a thousand miles west, to present-day Oklahoma, along what came to be known as the Trail of Tears. As much as a fifth of the population died along the way.
In the days after the Court’s ruling, people kept texting Hoskin the opening line from Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise”—outlined in nineteenth-century treaties—that if tribal nations ceded their land east of the Mississippi they would be provided reservations in present-day Oklahoma. After removal, the Cherokee Nation established itself in what was then known as Indian Territory, and began setting up schools, courts, and governments. (There are two smaller Cherokee groups: the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, who resisted removal and remained in western North Carolina, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, who settled in Indian Territory prior to removal.) But tribal autonomy was short-lived. Oklahoma celebrated statehood with a symbolic wedding ceremony between “Miss Indian Territory” and “Mr. Oklahoma Territory” and, in the name of unity, began systematically dismantling tribal power, dissolving tribal courts and dividing up communally held land. Hoskin grew up learning that Cherokee sovereign rights existed only on what is known as “restricted” land—the small fraction of property that had never passed out of tribal ownership.
The Muscogee Creek Nation, Oklahoma’s third most populous tribe, filed an amicus brief that was mentioned in the McGirt decision, and it was understood that the outcome would likely apply to the four other major tribes and to a handful of smaller ones. Hoskin’s feeling of triumph at McGirt was tinged with trepidation. “There’s plenty of people waiting on us to fall short, so they can say, ‘See? They can’t handle it.’ So there’s a lot of pressure to meet the moment,” he said. “Anyone who’s studied Cherokee history, or the history of any part of Indian Country, knows that there’s a tendency for there to be a backlash.” In the eighteen-thirties, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, acknowledged tribal sovereignty in a set of rulings generally known as the Cherokee cases. President Andrew Jackson ignored the Court and kept encouraging settlers to take Cherokee land. “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” Jackson is reported to have said. “Congress passed the Indian Removal Act—if you want to talk about an enormous backlash,” Hoskin told me. “So that’s in my mind, and in the mind of most Cherokees, when something good happens. I didn’t think there would be a second Indian Removal Act—I don’t think Congress has it in them. But my concern was that this dramatic expansion in the recognition of our sovereignty would be met with a really firm pushback. And that there could be a great deal of injury inflicted.”
Visitors to the capitol in Oklahoma City are directed to leave their cars in the south parking lot, behind an oil derrick. The pink granite building sits atop one of the country’s largest reservoirs of petroleum; until the mid-eighties, its grassy grounds were home to both a governmental complex and a working oil field. Inside, next to the door to the governor’s office, is a larger-than-life-size oil painting of the Oklahoma humorist and cowboy icon Will Rogers, himself a Cherokee citizen. (“I’m not one of these Americans whose ancestors come over on the Mayflower, but we met ’em at the boat when they landed,” Rogers once said. “And it’s always been to the everlasting discredit of the Indian race that we ever let ’em land.”)
Governor Stitt is steel-haired and genial, the son of a pastor and the grandson of a dairy farmer. He ran a mortgage company in Tulsa and voted only intermittently until 2017, when he attended the National Prayer Breakfast, where faith leaders mingle with elected officials, and was inspired to go into politics. Less than two years later, after running a campaign that touted his business experience and his status as a political outsider, he was elected governor. His tenure has been marked by friction with Oklahoma’s tribal nations. When the state legislature passed a bill allowing students to wear tribal regalia during graduation ceremonies, Stitt vetoed it. (The legislature overrode his veto.) For the position of Native American liaison, he selected Wes Nofire, a former member of the Cherokee council who has suggested that the Cherokee Nation is controlled by Satan. In the past several decades, the state and the tribes have entered into compacts governing everything from tobacco sales to hunting licenses. Stitt has repeatedly attempted to veto or renegotiate the compacts, and that has resulted in protracted legislative and legal battles.
His stalwart opposition to tribal interests has baffled people who are otherwise his political allies. Three top Republican officials in the state have signed on to a federal lawsuit against the Governor centering on his handling of tribal gaming compacts; the state’s attorney general accused Stitt of “betrayal of his duty.” “Even President Trump has mentioned he doesn’t know why the governor has such animosity toward the tribes,” Greg Treat, the Republican president pro tempore of the Oklahoma Senate, told the Associated Press last year. “It’s nonsensical.”
Stitt’s Cherokee heritage comes from his mother’s side of the family; he grew up alongside cousins who competed in the All Indian Rodeo Association. “I always thought it was really cool that I was part Indian. It’s such an important part of Oklahoma’s history,” he told me. “But I think of myself as an American and an Oklahoman, and I’m proud of my heritage.” In school, he learned about the symbolic wedding ceremony that marked statehood. “We chose to become one state. We decided we didn’t want to have reservations,” he said. “There was a marriage ceremony that was performed, and that meant something.” It struck him as unfair that tribal nations had a separate, parallel system of justice for their citizens: “Here I am, and my six children, with blond hair and blue eyes—they’re Indians as well. And you’re going to have a situation where they get a special set of rules? This is just ridiculous. It’s unbelievable.”
McGirt came as a surprise to Stitt, and a blow. “I mean, whose land is it?” he asked, his voice rising in bewilderment. “Is this Oklahoma? If it’s not, just tell me!” Stitt has framed his opposition to McGirt in the language of racial equality. “We can’t be a state that operates with two different sets of rules, especially based on race,” he has said. In a 2022 speech celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, he claimed that the civil-rights leader would be “astounded, maybe even disgusted” by the ruling. The tribes, however, have long maintained that tribal membership is not a racial category but a political one. (Ancestry is only one criterion that tribes may consider when determining citizenship.) Last year, the Court appeared to agree, upholding the legality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gives preference to Native families in adoption cases involving Native children.
People seemed more persuaded by another argument that Stitt has made: that McGirt created public-safety problems. “Hundreds of criminal cases are going unprosecuted,” he has claimed. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board called McGirt a “mistake” and warned of “mayhem” and “criminal anarchy in tribal areas.” The months after the decision were “tremendously chaotic, tremendously disruptive,” Matt Ballard, a state district attorney who covers territory that is now entirely on reservations, said. Cases involving tribal members were no longer his responsibility; instead, they were ceded to tribal or federal courts. (Under U.S. law, the longest sentence that a tribal court can impose is three years, for a maximum of three consecutive terms, so major crimes tend to be prosecuted in the federal system.)
Ballard also worried that tribal members who had been convicted by the state would request new trials. “We were looking at retrying cases, these horrendous crimes from the seventies and eighties,” he said. “The sheriff’s office has moved multiple times since then. We were literally trying to find where’s the evidence for these cases.” In court filings, Oklahoma described McGirt as a potential “get-out-of-jail-free card” for thousands of criminals. “There’s people being released from prison,” Stitt told a local Fox network affiliate, claiming that as many as seventy-six thousand cases might be overturned—almost three times the state’s prison population.
In 2021, a year after the decision, Ballard spoke on a panel convened by the Governor about the community impact of McGirt. His fellow-speakers included sheriffs and district attorneys, but no representatives from tribal leadership. The restive, raucous crowd carried signs that said things like “Illegal Jurisdiction Since 1907” and “You Are on Indian Land.” “We walked up on the stage, and it looked to me like a European soccer game,” a participant told me. “Everyone was angry.” When panelists said that McGirt was harming victims of crimes, the crowd jeered them. One speaker raised the spectre of criminals who, he suggested, might go free because of McGirt: murderers, rapists, robbers. “Like your forefathers!” someone yelled. The Governor gripped the sides of the podium with both hands.
When it was Ballard’s turn, he raised his voice to be heard over the crowd. “I will tell you what’s happening in every courthouse: Native victims are being victimized, and nobody is prosecuting their cases,” he said. “It’s a hard truth, it’s a hard truth to take. This situation is not workable.” The crowd began to chant, “Treaties are the law of the land.”
Later that year, the courts ruled that McGirt was not applicable retroactively, relieving the fear that old cases would have to be retried. Just sixty-eight people had been released from prison on McGirt-related appeals. A few months later, another Supreme Court case, Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, further limited McGirt, giving the state jurisdiction over crimes in which the victim was Native but the defendant was not. (The Violence Against Women Act still allows tribes to prosecute non-Natives for certain crimes committed against tribal citizens, including child abuse and domestic violence.)
Meanwhile, tribes were scrambling to scale up their criminal-justice infrastructure, hiring prosecutors, police officers, court clerks, judges, and 911 dispatchers; setting up victim-services offices; and expanding juvenile-justice programs. Instead of handling several dozen criminal cases a year, the Cherokee system was now responsible for several thousand. The head prosecutor for the Choctaw Nation said that the tribe’s caseload increased by more than two thousand per cent. In the pre-McGirt era, the Muscogee Creek Lighthorse Tribal Police averaged one call for service a day; that number grew tenfold. “You know, I knew people were bad, and I knew crime was bad, but, when McGirt happened, and we started getting the calls for domestics, child abuse, things like that . . . ,” Dennis Northcross, the deputy chief of the Lighthorse police, told me, too overwhelmed to finish the thought. Investigating major crimes largely fell to the F.B.I., which enlisted dozens of agents from around the country to assist. “The challenge for us is that we must provide this basic level of policing in the eastern half of Oklahoma, but we also have to insure we are still doing all the things the American public expects the F.B.I. to do,” Melissa Godbold, the special agent in charge of the Bureau’s Oklahoma City field office, said in 2021.
The district attorneys I spoke with agreed that things had stabilized since the initial post-McGirt months, but they still noted concerns about sentencing disparities and cases being dropped. Ballard told me about a drug case involving three suspects—one Native, two non-Native. “It’s very frustrating to be told you only have jurisdiction over two-thirds of a conspiracy,” he said. Under state law, the non-Native defendants could face thirty years in prison; if the Native defendant were convicted in tribal court, he would receive a much lower sentence. “What I’ve seen from the Cherokee Nation is an earnest desire to do this as well as they possibly can,” Jack Thorp, a district attorney whose territory overlaps with the Cherokee reservation, told me. “But they’re hamstrung by this three-year cap.” Cases can be picked up by the federal government, but the U.S. Attorney’s office tends to be choosier about what it pursues. Elsewhere in Indian Country, the federal government has faced significant criticism for inadequate prosecutions, particularly when it comes to sexual assaults. “I appreciate our federal partners, but they’re not set up to handle cases like this—property crimes, drug crimes,” Ballard said. “They’re just not.”
Rebecca Nagle, a journalist who has covered McGirt in the podcast “This Land” and in her forthcoming book, “By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land,” told me that anxieties about crime have often been used as an excuse to chip away at tribal sovereignty. The more pressing public-safety issue, she said, was state officials who refused to coöperate with their tribal counterparts, sometimes for fear of displeasing the Governor’s office.
When I spoke to Geri Wisner, the attorney general of the Muscogee Creek Nation, she told me that she had initially been hopeful that tribal and local authorities could work collaboratively, but that some local authorities were resisting acknowledging tribes’ expanded authority. The Muscogee Nation’s communication with certain district attorneys was functionally nonexistent, and cases were falling through the cracks. “I’ve been trying to tell everyone, ‘The barn’s on fire! The barn’s on fire!’ ” Wisner told me.
Last year, state authorities arrested a woman for strangling her daughter with a rope. When they determined that the woman, Tracy Ann Mannon, was a Muscogee Creek citizen, they dismissed the case and alerted federal prosecutors, who also declined the case. The U.S. Attorney’s office said that it had e-mailed the Muscogee Creek Nation twice, but the messages bounced back. “I didn’t get a word of it,” Wisner said. “This is a strangulation—a strangulation of a minor!” Earlier this year, Mannon was arrested again. Allegedly, she had stabbed her mother to death and was planning to dismember the body. In an interview with a local news station, District Attorney Larry Edwards implied that McGirt was the reason Mannon had been free: “Oftentimes, we see that justice is not served, because cases are dismissed, and, as far as we can tell, sometimes nothing happens to them, and then sometimes we see terrible things in the aftereffect.” (Edwards told me that he now forwards all dismissed cases to both tribal and federal prosecutors.)
In some parts of the state, there has been outright hostility between tribal and local officials. This has been particularly true with the Muscogee Creek Nation, which has a reputation for being more assertive of tribal sovereignty than the other major tribes. Last winter, Stitt was campaigning in Iowa with Ron DeSantis, whom he supported for President, when he received an urgent phone call. “They go, ‘Governor! The Indians and the sheriff are pointing guns at each other! They’re surrounding our jailhouse, they’re trying to take our jailer!’ ” Stitt told me, widening his eyes at the recollection. “I’m, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, what is going on?’ ”
Both sides deny that any guns were drawn, but they agree that events that week in Okmulgee County, a largely rural area west of Tulsa that’s now part of the Muscogee Creek reservation, marked a flash point in tensions between tribal and non-tribal officials.
Historically, many tribal law-enforcement departments have had cross-deputization agreements with their state and local counterparts, which allowed officers to detain and arrest suspects regardless of their tribal status. (Once a suspect had been booked, the relevant agency—tribal, state, or federal—would take over.) A decade ago, the Okmulgee sheriff, Eddy Rice, rescinded cross-deputization with the Muscogee Creek Lighthorse Tribal Police, citing liability concerns. Northcross, of the Lighthorse police, had a different theory. “I think it’s a power thing with the sheriff,” he said. After McGirt, the state recommended that law-enforcement departments should sign cross-deputization agreements, if they hadn’t already; Rice opted not to. Northcross said, “The area that he covers is totally encompassed by, and included in, our area. He went from being a big fish in a little pond to being a little fish in a big pond. Don’t think he appreciates that.” After a long pause, he continued, “And I think it’s some old prejudices—I do. There are some old prejudices there.” Rice told me that prejudice was not a factor, and that he was motivated by a desire to protect citizens against what he saw as illegitimate policing by tribal law enforcement. “Everybody thought we were being buttheads, but that is not what any of it is about,” he said. “It’s not just a simple power struggle. The sheriff is the last stance against the federal government to protect the rights of the people. So I have chosen to try to protect rights.”
The Okmulgee County incident began last December, when a Lighthorse police officer named Keith Bell searched a suspect and found a small bag of fentanyl. Because the suspect was non-Native, Bell called the city police, who didn’t respond. He didn’t want to let the man loose, but, because he wasn’t cross-deputized with the sheriff’s department, he couldn’t make an arrest. There was a potential work-around, however: the Lighthorse police were cross-deputized with an obscure state organization called the Grand River Dam Authority. In the past, this had been interpreted to mean that the Lighthorse police could make arrests in any county where the G.R.D.A. had property—including Okmulgee County. Northcross, expecting trouble, elected to come along to the county jail. When the tribal police brought the man into a holding cell, the jailers refused to accept the suspect, and the tribal officers refused to release him. The dispute became a shouting match; one jailer reportedly accused the tribal officers of not being “real police.” The jailers retreated to the secure booking area, and Northcross followed them. The door slammed shut behind him, leaving Bell and another tribal officer locked in a holding cell with the suspect. In a video of the incident, a jailer appears to shove Northcross as one of the tribal officers shouts, “Hey! Get your hands off of him!” In the background, the suspect wails, “What is going on? Oh, my God, this is all because of me? I’m so sorry!” Northcross, who is preternaturally understated, described the scene as “not pleasant” and “pretty heated.” Eventually, after consulting with the district attorney, the jailers reluctantly accepted the prisoner. Tribal prosecutors charged the jailer who pushed Northcross with felony battery of a law-enforcement officer, but they later dropped the charges. As a result of the conflict, Stitt suspended the G.R.D.A. cross-deputization, which means that tribal law enforcement can no longer detain non-Natives in Okmulgee County.
The sheriff’s office and the tribal police are effectively engaged in a cold war. “It’s ugly here,” Rice said. When Lighthorse police call the sheriff’s department in order to hand over a non-Native suspect, “they refuse to come,” Northcross said. “They usually say they’re busy. They’re always busy.” For their part, the Lighthorse police have largely given up on patrolling Okmulgee County. “I understand they don’t want to come here, because we don’t have a great working relationship,” Rice conceded. But, according to him, the lapse in tribal law enforcement has made his county less safe. “If you’re a Native, you get away with anything!” he said. “We got people, you know, criminals, that are riding motorcycles, hot-rodding, and speeding through the city of Okmulgee every single day, and nobody does nothing about that.”
Stitt blamed the incident on “the broken system created by the McGirt decision,” and used the occasion “to call on Congress and the courts to address this problem.” Oklahoma has considered several paths to curbing the power of tribes and returning the state to the pre-McGirt status quo. One would involve Congress officially disestablishing the reservations recognized by McGirt. “The Supreme Court started this bullcrap,” Rice told me. “But say that we have a different President in the future. Then you may have a Congress that steps in and says, ‘Hey, these people are struggling in Oklahoma. Maybe we ought to help.’ ”
A more likely pathway involves the courts. McGirt was one of the final decisions made while Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still a Justice; since the Court’s composition has changed, Oklahoma has pursued numerous attempts to overturn or significantly limit tribal sovereignty. The decision in Castro-Huerta, which was favorable to Oklahoma, indicates that the Court may be receptive.
In February, 2021, Keith Stitt, the Governor’s older brother, was driving his Range Rover to Tulsa, where he works as a real-estate attorney. The speed limit was fifty miles per hour; according to a Tulsa police officer, who pulled him over, Keith was going seventy-eight. When the officer asked for his identification in order to write him a ticket, Keith presented his Oklahoma driver’s license. He also showed the officer his Cherokee Nation citizenship card. “Isn’t this my get-out-of-jail-free card?” he asked.
Many of the most bitter post-McGirt fights between the state and tribes have centered not on murders but on traffic tickets. “Tickets are money,” Wisner, the Muscogee Creek attorney general, explained; after McGirt, those summonses were now supposed to be sent to tribal governments. (The Cherokee Nation set up a revenue-sharing agreement that allows towns to keep most of the money.) Last year, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals said that Tulsa cannot ticket tribal members for infractions on reservations. But the Tulsa police continued to do so. The Muscogee Creek Nation sued the city, and the case is still pending. According to Wisner, other jurisdictions have begun to ticket tribal members as well, rather than transferring those cases to the tribe. “It started with Tulsa, and it’s been like an infection,” she said. “Now I’ve got it all over the place.”
As Governor Stitt explored avenues to chip away at tribal sovereignty, his brother hired a lawyer and contested his ticket, claiming that, as he was a tribal citizen, the city of Tulsa had no jurisdiction over him. The case is currently in front of the state’s highest court. Everyone I spoke with in Oklahoma seemed mystified by the situation: one brother trying to overturn McGirt, the other using it as the basis for a protracted legal crusade to challenge a speeding ticket. Some people in tribal leadership speculated that Keith’s legal battle was part of his brother’s attempt to undermine McGirt, either through bad press or by provoking a court decision unfavorable to the tribes. It’s not inconceivable that Keith’s case could eventually be taken up by the Supreme Court. When I asked the Governor about his brother’s speeding ticket, he burst into laughter. “I love it!” he said. “It’s so funny—the tribes are having to do amicus briefs in support of Keith.” He told me that the ticket was in no way a setup, but implied that his brother’s lawsuit might not be in good faith. “You’ll have to talk to Keith,” he said. “But maybe Keith wants to show how absurd all this is as well.”
Hoskin was twelve in 1987, when another Supreme Court decision changed the trajectory of Native history. The Court ruled that tribes could conduct gaming operations independent of state regulations. The Cherokee soon built casinos, and his father was later on the tribal council as it determined how to allocate the revenue. “The new money coming in was measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was a game changer,” Hoskin recalled; the tribe used it to expand housing for elders. Court cases have been crucial for the acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty, but actually putting sovereignty into practice—building the institutions that enact it—requires something else: funding.
These days, Cherokee businesses—primarily but not only the casinos—bring in billions of dollars, and the tribe’s projects have become much more ambitious. In Tahlequah, I toured the gleaming Cherokee Nation hospital, which offers health-care services at no cost to members of any federally recognized tribe.“Providing health care to our own citizens is a way we exercise sovereignty,” Brian Hail, the deputy executive director of Cherokee Nation Health Services, told me. Farther down the highway, in the airy Cherokee Nation Durbin Feeling Language Center, which offers full-immersion programs, posters listed colors and animals in the Cherokee syllabary, which faces what Hoskin describes as an “existential threat” of disappearing.
But the current levels of funding may not be enough. In 2022, members of Oklahoma’s House delegation told the Appropriations Committee that investing in the criminal-justice system so as to comply with McGirt was “effectively bankrupting the affected tribes.” In the first year after the decision, the Cherokee Nation allocated thirty million dollars to fund the expansion of its courts and law enforcement. What’s more, the emphasis on criminal justice, even if it’s meted out by tribal authorities, was met with some ambivalence by the community. (One evening, at a rodeo in Okmulgee County, just before the bull-riding competition, the announcer called the Lighthorse police into the arena, where they stood awkwardly, shoulder to shoulder. “They are not the enemy,” the announcer told the audience sternly. “And the best way to get along with them is to comply.” The family sitting in front of me declined to applaud.)
“I didn’t want to go into public service and politics because I wanted to oversee this massive growth of our criminal-justice system,” Hoskin told me. “I see what a lot of people see, which is a system that chews people up and spits them out. We don’t want to re-create that system. That’s a big fear of mine.” He had been weighing whether the Cherokee Nation should build its own jail, rather than renting space in state facilities. (Oklahoma has the second-highest jail-mortality rate in the country.) “There’s also an opportunity to do incarceration differently,” he said. “Frankly, though, right out of the gate, we did things substantially the same as the state.”
Along with Keith Stitt’s speeding ticket, a number of McGirt-related cases are making their way through the courts. Every decision begets more questions: Do tribal citizens living and working on reservation land have to pay state income tax? How far does sovereignty extend, and how far will the state go to fight it? “I’m not going to be the governor that sells my state down the river,” Kevin Stitt said. “Maybe some future governor will. But I’m not going down in history as a person that gave an inch.” ♦
A previous version of this article misidentified the plaintiff in the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision and a news station that quoted Governor Kevin Stitt, and misstated the number of tribes affected by the case and Keith Stitt’s place of residence.
