Indian Country Can Be Meaningful Again
Video Transcribed: What’s changed in Indian country since McGirt? My name’s Ted Hasse. I’m an attorney in Tulsa, practicing in federal and tribal courts.
Since McGirt, which was a Supreme Court decision that affected jurisdiction in eastern Oklahoma and Indian Country in ways beyond the scope of this video. There’ll be other videos you can look at if you need a description of McGirt. But just to talk about for those people who are aware of what’s happened, there was this case, Oklahoma versus McGirt, that resulted in most of eastern Oklahoma being declared still Indian Country, still Indian reservation, and thus having all of the jurisdiction issues around that.
What’s happened since then, a lot of it we saw very quickly, and that was a tsunami of cases in federal court and in tribal court. Most of those cases were with Native American defendants and members of the nations. However, quite a few defendants were ending up in tribal court and federal court that was not Native American. Some were non-Native Americans, but their alleged victims were Native Americans. Well, we’ve had a follow-up case from the Supreme Court, Oklahoma versus Castro Huerta, which has resulted in there being what we call concurrent jurisdiction between the state of Oklahoma and federal tribes with regard to non-Native Americans.
There are a narrow group of types of cases for which the nations can’t have jurisdiction over a non-Native American, and those are domestic violence cases. If you are dealing with a domestic violence case, you’ll definitely want to give us a call. It’s a situation where it can be tricky, particularly for non-Native Americans.
What do we expect to see going forward? There’s not going to be a change going forward. While there is a lot of political will to go back to the way things were, there is no going back. We are living in a post-McGirt Oklahoma, and Indian Country is here to stay. So I think that obviously, the biggest change since McGirt is that this distinction, Indian Country, is actually meaningful again. Indian Country means something, and now most of eastern Oklahoma is just that Cherokee Nation, Muskogee Nation, Choctaw Nation, and Chickasaw Nation.
If you or a loved one is facing charges in Indian Country, you’ll need a good Oklahoma criminal defense lawyer. Please call me. My name is Ted Hasse. I can be reached at (918) 932-2800.