Welcome to Oklahoma, a state in the South Central United States.

Its name comes from the Choctaw word, Okla, meaning people and Hama, meaning red.

This is the land of the red people.

My name is Allison Errara.

I'm Selining, a tribe from the Central part of California.

I'm the Indigenous Affairs Reporter for a public radio station here and I've been covering

Oklahoma for six years, as tensions build over the fight for tribal sovereignty for Indigenous

people in the state.

In July of 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that about 40% of eastern Oklahoma is reservation

land for the purposes of criminal jurisdiction.

It meant the state no longer had the power to prosecute certain people accused of committing

felony crimes when they happened on Indian land.

And it promised to be the catalyst for a positive change for Native Americans fulfilling a promise

at the far end of the trail of tears, as Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his opinion on the case.

So to have the highest court in the land not only recognize that the Muscogee Creek

Nation's reservation was our reservation, but that it will continue to be forever more,

that was huge on a profoundly personal spiritual level.

Whatever before has a state woken up after more than a century and been told that half

of a modern day state is now a collection of Native American reservations.

It was a tremendous curveball for Oklahoma and is a completely unprecedented situation.

But two years later, another Supreme Court ruling is attempting to claw back at scope.

Tribal nations in Oklahoma and beyond argued that more than 200 years of legal precedence

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