For Oklahoma Tribe, Supreme Court Case Brings Vindication at Long Last - The New York Times

After decades of betrayals and broken treaties, the Supreme Court ruled that much of Oklahoma is their land, after all.

The sorrow and death of the Trail of Tears were still fresh when a band of Muscogee (Creek) people gathered by an oak tree in 1836 to deposit the ashes of the ceremonial fires they had carried across America and begin a new home in the West.

Then this week, the Supreme Court confirmed what the Muscogee (Creek) Nation has long asserted: That this land was their land.

“It’s so momentous and it’s immense,” said Joy Harjo, the United States poet laureate and a Muscogee (Creek) Nation member who lives in Tulsa.

Not just for Muscogee Creek people, for all Native people.”.

The court’s 5-to-4 declaration that much of Tulsa and eastern Oklahoma had long been a reservation of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation was seen as a watershed victory for Native Americans’ long campaign to uphold sovereignty, tribal boundaries and treaty obligations.

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, which has 86,100 enrolled members, stretches across three million acres of rolling hills, grasslands, small towns and cities across 11 counties in eastern Oklahoma.

“We experienced genocide, assimilation, colonization, conversion policy by the government,” said Amos McNac, 77, a justice on the Nation’s Supreme Court and heles-hayv, a medicine man.

But Muscogee citizens said they were not surprised by more alarmist responses, including a tweet by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, saying that the court “just gave away half of Oklahoma, literally.

The court’s decision will reshape how the criminal-justice system treats Native Americans by preventing state or local authorities from prosecuting Indigenous people who commit crimes on reservation land.

When the Muscogee (Creek) Nation filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing that the court honor the 19th-century treaties that created the reservation, it took pains to point out that the tribe already runs a fully functioning government.

State officials began denying that there had ever been a Creek reservation on land that became Oklahoma