Spatializing Reparations

Abstract

On July 29, 2022, the United States Supreme Court ruled on the Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta case in favor of the state of Oklahoma. In doing so, the Court formally limited criminal jurisdiction on Indigenous lands and thus further eroded Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy. The Court concluded that Indigenous courts do not have the authority to criminally charge non-Indigenous people, even if that person has committed a crime against an Indigenous person, on Indigenous lands. Instead, states possess concurrent jurisdiction with the federal government over crimes committed by all non-Indigenous people.1 This decision comes just shy of the two-year anniversary of the ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) in which the Supreme Court concluded that nearly 43 percent of what is commonly known as the state of Oklahoma is in fact still Indigenous territory, and thus affirmed tribal jurisdiction over the eastern part of the state.2 In the McGirt case, mapping boundaries of Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole territories over time proved essential in the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Indigenous sovereignty (Figure 1). The McGirt decision represented a landmark victory for Indigenous struggles for sovereignty over their lands as it is one of the few moments in United States history where the US had been held legally responsible for adhering to and fulfilling its treaty obligations.3 The case of Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta directly challenged McGirt, with the state of Oklahoma arguing that Indigenous tribal courts should not have authority over non-Indigenous people, even if those people are occupying Indigenous lands. While Castro-Huerta did not overturn McGirt completely, the case does symbolically represent a looming threat. And what’s more, in the weeks leading up to Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, the Supreme Court has shown that they are willing to reassess any and all previously established US legal precedent: the Court has limited the agency of all those residing in the US over their own bodies by overturning Roe v. Wade (1973) in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022)4 and has lifted previously established regulatory policies for environmental management in West Virginia v. EPA (2022).5 At their core, these legal decisions actively expand the jurisdiction of federal and state governments to erode sovereignty over bodies and land. And further, the Supreme Court’s shifting approach from largely upholding precedent to reconsidering it, directly mounts pressure against Indigenous sovereignty: Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta explicitly narrows the scope of Indigenous governance over their own lands and directly challenges their autonomy as sovereign nations. These recent Supreme Court rulings are forewarnings that without returning lands to Indigenous peoples, their sovereignty and freedom over themselves and their lands are always up for negotiation. As the McGirt and Castro-Huerta cases reveal, returning land in purely symbolic terms is grossly insufficient; land-back frameworks must address the spatial, legal, and political realities to not only define the physical boundaries of returned ownership but must also provide systems to dynamically uphold and support what geographer Sara Safransky calls “alternative forms of sovereignty, political subjectivity, and personhood.”6 To this end, I borrow from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s logic that moving toward a more just future requires that justice be embodied, spatialized, and “part of the process of making a place.”7 Making place thus demands redrawing the United States landscape as literal ground for Indigenous sovereignty by mapping boundaries of dispossession in order to propose new boundaries for the return of lands to Indigenous peoples. In this way, drawing is a foundational tool to visualize the United States’ liability in the spatial power dynamics enacted against Indigenous peoples and to offer strategies towards an anticolonial, antiracist future. And thus, visualizing the past and present conditions as means toward imagining new future engagement with land unsettles what Robert Nichols calls “recursive dispossession,” a process in which historic dispossessions generate property, which in turn reinforces and generates further dispossession. These processes have continually constructed enduring cycles of social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental injustices that are experienced in uneven ways and therefore must be overturned.8 Spatializing Reparations Mapping Reparative Futures