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Page Number: 25

22 

MCGIRT v. OKLAHOMA 

Opinion of the Court 

members today constitute a small fraction of those now re-
siding  on  the  land,  and  that  the  area  now  includes  a  “vi-
brant  city  with  expanding  aerospace,  healthcare,  technol-
ogy, manufacturing, and transportation sectors.”  Brief for 
Petitioner in Carpenter v. Murphy, O. T. 2018, No. 17–1107, 
p. 15.  All  this  history,  we  are  told,  supplies  “compelling” 
evidence about the lands in question.

Maybe so, but even taken on its own terms none of this 
evidence  tells  the  story  we  are  promised.  Start  with  the 
State’s argument about its longstanding practice of assert-
ing  jurisdiction  over  Native  Americans.  Oklahoma  pro-
ceeds  on  the  implicit  premise  that  its  historical  practices
are  unlikely  to  have  defied  the  mandates  of  the  federal 
MCA.  That  premise,  though,  appears  more  than  a  little
shaky.  In  conjunction  with  the  MCA,  §1151(a)  not  only 
sends  to  federal  court  certain  major  crimes  committed  by
Indians on reservations.  Two doors down, in §1151(c), the 
statute does the same for major crimes committed by Indi-
ans on “Indian allotments, the Indian titles of which have 
not  been  extinguished.”  Despite  this  direction,  however, 
Oklahoma  state  courts  erroneously  entertained  prosecu-
tions for major crimes by Indians on Indian allotments for 
decades, until state courts finally disavowed the practice in
1989.  See State v. Klindt, 782 P. 2d 401, 404 (Okla. Crim. 
App.  1989)  (overruling  Ex parte  Nowabbi,  60  Okla.  Crim. 
III, 61 P. 2d 1139 (1936)); see also United States v. Sands, 
968 F. 2d 1058, 1062–1063 (CA10 1992).  And if the State’s 
prosecution practices disregarded §1151(c) for so long, it’s 
unclear why we should take those same practices as a reli-
able guide to the meaning and application of §1151(a). 

Things  only  get  worse  from  there.  Why  did  Oklahoma 
historically  think  it  could  try  Native  Americans  for  any 
crime committed on restricted allotments or anywhere else? 
Part  of  the  explanation,  Oklahoma  tells  us,  is  that  it 
thought the eastern half of the State was always categori-
cally  exempt  from  the  terms  of  the  federal  MCA.  So