Uploaded May 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This session is part of “Perspectives in History,” the 2021 Oklahoma History Conference. Notable scholars have described the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century histories of the Five Tribes in well-researched treatises. However, these scholarly works did not analyze the detailed text of the many complex federal laws relevant to convenient, but false, popular assumptions advanced by state officials for decades: the ideas that Congress terminated the Five Tribes’ governments and disestablished their reservations, and that Five Tribes citizens disappeared into a great melting pot in the new state.
In finding that the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation continues to exist, the 2020 Supreme Court majority opinion in McGirt and the 2017 Tenth Circuit opinion in Murphy (affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2020) interpreted relevant federal treaties and statutes without accepting past assumptions. This presentation will discuss some of the more important historical perspectives discussed by the parties, amici, and the Court in these cases.
Susan Work, an attorney and a Choctaw Nation citizen, has represented several Oklahoma tribes, including the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, and Seminole Nations. Now semi-retired, she served as co-counsel on amici curiae briefs on behalf of historians and legal scholars in the Murphy and McGirt Creek Reservation cases decided by the Supreme Court last year. She is the author of “The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, A Legal History” (OU Press, 2010).
This session is part of “Perspectives in History,” the 2021 Oklahoma History Conference. Notable scholars have described the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century histories of the Five Tribes in well-researched treatises. However, these scholarly works did not analyze the detailed text of the many complex federal laws relevant to convenient, but false, popular assumptions advanced by state officials for decades: the ideas that Congress terminated the Five Tribes’ governments and disestablished their reservations, and that Five Tribes citizens disappeared into a great melting pot in the new state.
In finding that the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation continues to exist, the 2020 Supreme Court majority opinion in McGirt and the 2017 Tenth Circuit opinion in Murphy (affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2020) interpreted relevant federal treaties and statutes without accepting past assumptions. This presentation will discuss some of the more important historical perspectives discussed by the parties, amici, and the Court in these cases.
Susan Work, an attorney and a Choctaw Nation citizen, has represented several Oklahoma tribes, including the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, and Seminole Nations. Now semi-retired, she served as co-counsel on amici curiae briefs on behalf of historians and legal scholars in the Murphy and McGirt Creek Reservation cases decided by the Supreme Court last year. She is the author of “The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, A Legal History” (OU Press, 2010).
