The rightwing supreme court has another target: Native American rights | Nick Estes
In last month’s Oklahoma v Castro-Huerta, the court tore up centuries of legal precedent and Native sovereignty
In 1886, the supreme court in United States v Kagama described states as the “deadliest enemies” of Native nations. The case concerned criminal jurisdiction on Indian reservations, but it also recognized the role states, and their citizens, played in fueling Native conflict and dispossession. It was a rare occasion in which the court acknowledged it was making Indian law in the context of great violence and suffering.
Paradoxically, the court found that the very nation that waged wars of extermination and invasion against Native people also declared itself their sole guardian, protecting its “wards” from the “local ill feeling” of land-hungry whites flooding Native lands in the western states. And where the US constitution was lacking in language defining federal authority over Native nations, the court had invented it, for better or for worse.
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and host of The Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
