Forcing that is a damn good thing.
The USA has a lot to account for, and it is very sick.
Rough roads ahead. Maybe they lead to better places.
I do not feel good about the last 4 or so decades of travel.
As a people, maybe world, we may well be better for going down this road.
However I also strongly believe that our future prosperity is based more on current actions than past circumstances. And therefore believe that attempts to redress long past ills are actively harmful to us as a society. And furthermore believe that a focus on long past harms on the part of groups who were victimized is actively harmful to the people who are focused on the past.
And therefore I believe that there should be some sort of statute of limitations on which past harms we are willing to try to redress. I don't support trying to redress ills from over a century ago whether we are talking about restoring native reservations, or paying reparations for slavery. If you go back far enough, we all were done wrong to by someone else. And usually you don't have to go back too far to find it.
For example it was less than 100 years ago that my Irish grandparents were targeted by the KKK in a part of Oregon where my cousins still live. I know because my now deceased aunt and uncles told me about it. Many descendants of the KKK members still live in the same place.
On a side note, it is a little shocking to me that so many support a decision in favor of a man who was convicted of sodomizing a 4 year old child.
I'm sure no one here is supporting this offender, but whether someone is guilty or not, they are entitled to a just trial that properly follows the legal system. The supreme court has ruled that he was not afforded that.
I can understand this, and I think a lot of people are open to argumentation on this. Where it seems to get complex is when those past harms seem to have had a chain reaction that lingers and causes problems for people today.
Do I support recompense for someone just because their great grandparent was a slave? No. Do I support recompense because someone lives in a slum and has had poor choices in life available to them because of structural problems resulting in their parent and grandparents situations because of the situation of that great grandparent? Maybe? Yes? I think it's a harder and more complex question with a lot more to consider when laid out in that manner, so I don't have a simple answer.
Just because our (US) myopic society places plaques on any building over 100 years old and calls it "historic" does not mean that we get the right to say that something is "too old" to be rememberd and corrected.
Native American's had histories going back, in many cases, thousands of years and for them much of the destruction was relatively recent and they have not forgiven or forgotten.
Heal the past, prepare for the future.
I do not believe people are supporting the 'individual' in question but are focusing on the principle that was argued. In addition, this person can be retried in Federal courts
This position assumes the ills from over a century ago have been fully resolved _right now_. Watching the news, that does not seem to be case.
(I try not to put these words in your mouth, you're stating "And strongly support fixing our ongoing treatment of them."!)
The decision doesn't mean he goes free. It means he gets a new trial in a Federal court. I expect the new trial will convict him and he'll just be serving more time in a Federal prison instead of the state prison where he has been for the past 20 years.
That isn't what this decision is doing. This decision is pointing out that the current state of the law is not what the State of Oklahoma claims to think it was. (But even that claim is dubious since, as the Court's opinion notes, Oklahoma admitted more than 30 years ago that it was improperly taking jurisdiction over cases that should have been tried in Federal courts.) It's not saying "we should give eastern Oklahoma back to the Creeks". It's saying "eastern Oklahoma, according to current law, is a Creek reservation". And it gives plenty of examples of how this fact has been implicitly recognized for quite a while.
The decision also does not affect anything involving non-Indians on the land in question. The city of Tulsa doesn't have to move. Nobody has to leave their homes. No business arrangements have to change. All it does is explicitly recognize that a certain class of criminal cases need to be tried in Federal courts instead of Oklahoma state courts.