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The Oklahoma Commission on Cooperative Sovereignty was recently formed by Governor Kevin Stitt to explore the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma

 

McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. 2020, was a landmark United States Supreme Court case which ruled that, as pertaining to the Major Crimes Act, much of the eastern portion of the state of Oklahoma remains as Native American lands of the prior Indian reservations of the Five Civilized Tribes, never disestablished by Congress as part of the Oklahoma Enabling Act of 1906. 

 

Prior to its statehood in 1907, about half of the land in Oklahoma in the east, including the Tulsa metro area today, had belonged to the Five Civilized Tribes. There had been several decades of warfare and conflict during the 19th century over these lands between the Native Americans and the United States, including the Trail of Tears. 

 

By 1906, the United States Congress passed the Oklahoma Enabling Act, which had been taken to disestablish the reservations, and enabling Oklahoma's statehood. The former reservation lands, those of the Five Civilized Tribes as well as the other tribes in the state, were allocated into areas by tribe that were given suzerainty governing rights to the tribe to handle internal matters for Native Americans within the boundaries, but otherwise the state retained jurisdiction for non-Native Americans and for all other purposes such as law enforcement and prosecution.

 

Background on the basis of the McGirt case:

 

Jimcy McGirt had been tried and convicted of performing sex crimes against an underage child in 1996 in Oklahoma, and was serving a life sentence for the crime. When the Tenth Circuit delivered its verdict on Murphy's case in 2017, McGirt was one of several convicts who had similar cases to Murphy's, Native American descendants that had been tried and convicted in state courts for crimes committed on lands that were part of the former reservations, who sought appeals based on the new ruling from the Tenth Circuit after the state denied him relief. The Supreme Court granted McGirt's petition in December 2019.

 

Listen To Governor Stitt, Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr and Cooperative Sovereignty Commission Member State Senator Julie Daniels Talk About the McGirt v Oklahoma Decision and The Cooperative Sovereignty Commission in Their Own Words: