Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf
Page Number: 32.0

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

29 

Opinion of the Court 

country under subsection (b).  So Oklahoma lacks jurisdic-
tion to prosecute Mr. McGirt whether the Creek lands hap-
pen to fall in one category or another.

About  this,  Oklahoma  is  at  least  candid.  It  admits  the 
entire  point  of  its  reclassification  exercise  is  to  avoid  So-
lem’s  rule  that  only  Congress  may  disestablish  a  reserva-
tion.  And to achieve that, the State has to persuade us not 
only  that  the  Creek  lands  constitute  a  “dependent  Indian
community” rather than a reservation.  It also has to con-
vince us that we should announce a rule that dependent In-
dian community status can be lost more easily than reser-
vation status, maybe even by the happenstance of shifting 
demographics.

To answer this argument, it’s enough to address its first 
essential premise.  Holding that the Creek never had a res-
ervation would require us to stand willfully blind before a 
host of federal statutes.  Perhaps that is why the Solicitor 
General, who supports Oklahoma’s disestablishment argu-
ment, refuses to endorse this alternative effort.  It also may
be why Oklahoma introduced this argument for affirmance
only for the first time in this Court.  And it may be why the
dissent makes no attempt to defend Oklahoma here.  What 
are we to make of the federal government’s repeated treaty
promises  that  the  land  would  be  “solemnly  guarantied  to
the Creek Indians,” that it would be a “permanent home,”
“forever set apart,” in which the Creek would be “secured in 
the  unrestricted  right  of  self-government”?    What  about 
Congress’s repeated references to a “Creek reservation” in
its statutes?  No one doubts that this kind of language nor-
mally suffices to establish a federal reservation.  So what 
could possibly make this case different?

Oklahoma’s answer only gets more surprising.  The rea-
son that the Creek’s lands are not a reservation, we’re told, 
is that the Creek Nation originally held fee title.  Recall that 
the Indian Removal Act authorized the President not only
to “solemnly . . . assure the tribe . . . that the United States