New Mexico passes bill to provide 'turquoise' safety alert when Indigenous people go missing

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3. Impact of the Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta Ruling

NBC
https://www.nbc.com › nbc-insider › found-how-does-tribal-law-works-on-indian-reservations

How Does Tribal Law Works on Indian Reservations? An Expert Weighs In - NBC

Nov 14, 2023Under the 2022 ruling, federal, tribal and state governments now have the ability to prosecute cases where a non-Native person

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Impact of the Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta Ruling

For hundreds of years, state and local law enforcement agencies had no rights to prosecute cases that occurred on tribal lands, but the recent, and controversial, US Supreme Court ruling in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta has given state governments the ability to prosecute certain cases.

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Under the 2022 ruling, federal, tribal and state governments now have the ability to prosecute cases where a non-Native person committed a crime on tribal land against a Native person. The ruling seemingly removes jurisdictional boundaries that had long been in place, according to NBC News.

“As a matter of state sovereignty, a State has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

The ruling, which overturned nearly 200 years of recognizing the tribal lands ability to self-govern, has drawn criticism from tribal leaders who worry it could further erode tribes’ abilities to govern their own people.

“As a citizen of a tribal nation, I feel violated,” Elizabeth Reese, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School and a citizen of the Nambé Pueblo, told NBC News last year after the decision. “After fighting for our own independence, and then negotiating this shared situation with the federal government for so long, it’s just an erosion of our ability to be the governments that we are.”

According to Fletcher, although state and local agencies may now have more authority to investigate and pursue cases on tribal lands, they often don’t have the resources to do so.

“State and local governments tend not to come on the reservation simply because they don’t have the resources to do it,” he said.

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