Chief: State’s take on McGirt ‘absurd’
Calls Stitt, AG ‘enemies of sovereignty’
For months, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has criticized the “dysfunctional chaos” of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that changed how crimes involving Native Americans are prosecuted.
Tribal nations have pushed back against that narrative. On Monday, several leaders presented a unified message: Stitt’s claims are exaggerated.
Cherokee Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. was most direct during a virtual Indian law symposium, calling Stitt and Oklahoma’s attorney general “enemies of sovereignty.”
“They’re trying to convince the country, not just people in Oklahoma, but the country, that the sky is falling. That the tribes cannot possibly be trusted with the responsibility to create a criminal justice system,” Hoskin said. “I think the opposite is true.”
The remarks at the annual
Sovereignty Symposium were the latest in the entrenched public debate between Stitt and tribes, which dates back almost since his election in 2018. Tensions flared in 2019 when he tried to force tribes to renegotiate agreements that spell out how much money the state receives from casinos.
The rift deepened over McGirt v. Oklahoma. The July 2020 Supreme Court decision shifted criminal jurisdiction for crimes involving Native Americans from the state to tribal and federal courts. There’s no agreement on the ruling’s rollout or scope. The state has filed a raft of legal challenges to overturn it. Hoskin said Oklahoma’s efforts boiled down to asking the Supreme Court to upend treaty promises.
“What an absurd proposition,” Hoskin said. “Can anyone believe in 2021, in the United States, that someone is, with a straight face, asking the Supreme Court of the United States to break a promise to an Indian tribe? And here we are on Indigenous Peoples Day.”
Ryan Leonard, the governor’s tribal liaison, also spoke at the symposium and refuted Hoskin’s remarks. No one is anti-sovereignty, he said. Stitt is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
“I can tell you, nobody wants to break any promises,” said Leonard, standing in front of the flags of the 39 tribal nations based in Oklahoma. Then he added, “There were promises made to multiple generations of Oklahomans dating back to the Land Run, that they thought they lived in a state.”
His remarks underscored a key state argument — that the Supreme Court intended only to shift jurisdiction involving crimes, not civil or tax matters. The ruling specifically applied to the Muscogee reservation in eastern Oklahoma, because justices concluded it had never been disestablished. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals extended the decision to cover the reservations of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations. Their reservation boundaries collectively cover much of eastern Oklahoma. The land was promised to the tribes by the federal government through treaties in exchange for ceding their homelands in the southeast U.S.
The top elected leaders of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations all spoke at Monday’s conference. In separate speeches, they each described how their nations had expanded and were continuing to grow their criminal justice systems to handle the surge of cases they now oversee. Each tribe went from handling several dozen criminal cases each year to more than 1,000 in the past year alone. They have hired prosecutors, public defenders, police officers, victim’s advocates and clerical staff. Many are planning to build more courthouses.
“The Chickasaw Nation’s history is full of challenges,” Chickasaw Gov. Bill Anoatubby said. “We’ve always risen to those challenges.”
Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton batted down a common claim that some people accused of crimes aren’t being prosecuted. The Choctaw Nation’s jurisdiction now covers part of southeast Oklahoma within its reservation boundaries.
“There has not been one person who has committed a crime that has fallen through the cracks,” Batton said. “Public safety is of utmost concern for our tribal members and the people who reside within our reservation.”
He went on to say, “We believe that if we can respect and honor one another’s sovereignty and work together, all of us 4 million Oklahomans can assure public safety will be upheld and criminals will be properly prosecuted.”
The vision of “working together” was a repeated often, but tribal leaders’ remarks made clear that wasn’t happening with the state itself. Anoatubby noted that tribal and state governments are both sovereign, meaning they are subject to federal laws, but not to each other.
“Just as Oklahoma guards its sovereignty from federal overreach, we too will zealously defend our sovereignty from Oklahoma’s intrusion or disregard,” said Anoatubby, whose nation covers 13 counties in the southern part of the state.
“When sovereigns abandon their respect for the rights of other sovereigns, our ability to work together breaks down and really can become difficult,” he later added.
Carly Atchison, a spokesperson for Oklahoma’s governor, said in a statement that Stitt’s intention is always to work together, but “there are some tribal leaders who view the McGirt decision much more broadly than what it is expressly limited to: federal major crimes.” As one example, she pointed to income tax appeals filed by Native Americans living on the lands affected by the McGirt ruling.
“Extending McGirt beyond what was expressly intended potentially impacts everything from taxation to zoning to regulation, all of which are fundamental questions of sovereignty of a state in the United States of America,” she said. “The governor’s goal is for Oklahoma to exist as a state, which requires jurisdictional certainty that we currently do not have due to McGirt.”
Leonard said state officials tried but could not find consensus among the tribes on joint agreements or federal legislation that would clarify the extent of the Supreme Court ruling.
“That left us really no other option than the courts, which is where we are today,” he said.
As proof of what can happen when two sides work together, leaders of the tribes pointed to dozens of agreements they have signed with counties and cities to cross-deputize law enforcement officers. The agreements are a contrast to the state’s rhetoric, said Muscogee Nation Principal Chief David Hill.
“The goal of this ‘chaos campaign’ seems intended to lead one of two outcomes: Passing legislation to overturn McGirt or having the Supreme Court overturn its own decision,” he said. “I believe we should be supporting the expansion of tribes capacity for self-governance, not looking at ways to weaken it.”
Hoskin, whose Cherokee nation is based in northeast Oklahoma, used the analogy of emergency responders reacting to a fire to describe current relations among tribes and the state as they respond to the Supreme Court decision.
“We’ve got three fire departments,” he said. “Two of them have leadership that is very calm, very present, trying to put out the fire. One of the departments has great men and women working for it, working hard every day. But they’ve got a leader running around with their own hair on fire, saying that there’s chaos, saying the building’s on fire.”
“Let’s work together,” he added. “There’s fires. We can put it out.”