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The Osage Nation filed a brief last week asking the federal government to reverse a 2009 decision that the Osage Reservation had been disestablished, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark McGirt case.

The motion, filed in the Tulsa federal district court on Thursday, Jan. 2, seeks relief from the court’s decision in Osage Nation vs. Irby that the Osage Reservation was disestablished when Oklahoma became a state in 1907, even though Congress never formally dissolved the reservation.

The Osage Nation has never accepted the validity of that decision and claim the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 McGirt decision, which re-affirmed reservation status for other Oklahoma tribes in criminal prosecution, should also apply to the Osage Nation.

The Irby case stems from a claim of an Osage Nation citizen who lives in Osage County — the boundaries of the Osage Reservation — should not pay income tax to the Oklahoma Tax Commission. The tribe agreed, stating the reservation has never been disestablished by Congress.

The decision in Osage Nation v. Irby was and is completely indefensible,” says Osage Nation Attorney General Clint Patterson in a news release. “The Osage Nation has the best case for a reservation. The Osage Nation purchased our reservation with our funds in 1872, and an act of Congress has never disestablished it. In their opinion, the 10th Circuit wrote exactly that before going to some extrinsic sources of history. The McGirt decision highlights the flaws in the Irby decision, and this motion gives us a chance to fix those flaws.” 

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