Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf
Page Number: 73

28 

MCGIRT v. OKLAHOMA 

ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting 

These  prosecutions  were  lawful,  the  Oklahoma  Supreme 
Court recognized at the time, because Congress had not in-
tended to “except out of [Oklahoma] an Indian reservation” 
upon its admission as a State.  Higgins v. Brown, 20 Okla. 
355, 419, 94 P. 703, 730 (1908). 

Instead of explaining how everyone at the time somehow 
missed that a reservation still existed, the Court resorts to 
misdirection.  It observes that Oklahoma state courts have 
held  that  they  erroneously  entertained  prosecutions  for 
crimes  committed  by  Indians  on  the  small  number  of  re-
maining  restricted  allotments  and  tribal  trust  lands  from 
the 1930s until 1989.  But this Court has not addressed that 
issue, and regardless, it would not tell us whether the State
properly prosecuted major crimes committed by Indians on 
the  lands  at  issue  here—the  unrestricted  fee  lands  that 
make up more than 95% of the Creek Nation’s former terri-
tory.  Perhaps  most  telling  is  that  the  State’s  jurisdiction 
over crimes on Indian allotments was hotly contested from 
an early date, whereas nobody raised objections based on a 
surviving reservation.  See, e.g., Ex parte Nowabbi, 60 Okla. 
Crim.  111,  61  P. 2d  1139  (1936),  overruled  by  State  v. 
Klindt, 782 P. 2d 401, 404 (Okla. Crim. App. 1989); see also 
ante, at 21 (“no court” suggested the “possibility” that “the
Creek lands really were part of a reservation” until 2017).6 
Lacking  any  other  arguments,  the  Court  suspects  uni-
form lawlessness: The State must have “overstepped its au-
thority”  in  prosecuting  thousands  of  cases  for  over  a  cen-
tury.  Ante, at 23.  Perhaps, the Court suggests, the State 

—————— 

6 The Court claims that the Oklahoma courts’ reasons for treating re-
stricted  allotments  as  Indian  country  must  apply  with  “equal  force”  to
the unrestricted fee lands at issue here, but the Court ultimately admits
the two types of land are “legally distinct.”  Ante, at 23, n. 10.  And any
misstep with regard to the small number of restricted allotments hardly
means the Oklahoma courts made the far more extraordinary mistake of 
failing to notice that the Five Tribes’ reservations—encompassing 19 mil-
lion acres—continued to exist.