The SCOTUS’s 2020 McGirt ruling holds that much of eastern Oklahoma is Indian country under the terms of an 1833 treaty between the U.S. government and the Muscogee Creek Nation. What this means is that only federal and tribal officials can prosecute crimes by or against Native Americans within those borders.
It’s unusual for someone to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit one of its decisions. It’s very rare for that to happen almost immediately after the ruling was issued. But in the two years since the court’s ruling in a key case about Native American rights, the state of Oklahoma has made that request more than 40 times.
State officials have also repeatedly refused to cooperate with tribal leaders to comply with the ruling, issued in 2020 and known as McGirt v. Oklahoma. Local governments, however, continue to cooperate with the tribes and show how the ruling could actually help build connections between the tribal governments and their neighbors.
...Since that ruling, federal courts have held that the lands in Oklahoma of five additional tribes – the Cherokee Nation, the Choctaw Nation, the Seminole Nation, the Chickasaw Nation and the Quapaw Nation – also remain American Indian country and are subject to federal and tribal jurisdiction under the 1885 federal law. Under these decisions, about 43% of Oklahoma is Indian country.
The combined rulings should have closed major legal loopholes allowing eastern Oklahoma suspected criminals to avoid prosecution through law enforcement disagreements over legal jurisdiction.
These kinds of conflicts have contributed to impeding tribal government efforts in many crucial areas of endeavor that overtly don’t seem to involve criminality, e.g., to set and implement environmental standards on their lands, including for water and air quality.
Although the source article doesn’t mention the issue of missing and murdered indigenous Americans, especially girls and women, a massive amount of reportage on the inability of families and tribes to resolve individual cases, and on the struggle of tribal endeavor to protect their members, repeatedly boils down to this same kind of conflict over jurisdiction resulting in incredibly vicious, lawless actions for decades committed with impunity.
More at the source: TheConversation: Oklahoma state officials resist Supreme Court ruling affirming tribal authority over American Indian country Very worth reading at an excellent website.