Thread by @TheRedTerra

For the last month I have woken up, gone outside, basked in sunlight, made some coffee, drank it, grit my teeth and started up my phone to see if SCOTUS had ruled on Haaland v. Brackeen yet, kickstarting a new GOP movement to steal Native children & undermine tribal sovereignty.

The Brackeens were White grandparents who wanted to adopt their Native grandchild after their white parent was killed and their Native parent had a drug problem. The case tugs at the heartstrings. If that's all you knew, you'd be inclined to think they were in the right.

But under the rules of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (#ICWA), courts must place Native children first with Native family members, or lacking that, other tribal members, or lacking that, RELATED tribes (such as a Creek kid going to a Seminole home, both Muscogean tribes).

This law wasn't some weird anomaly; it was a bipartisan reaction to CENTURIES of theft and mistreatment of Native children. From the moment White colonizers stepped foot in North America, they had been stealing Native children, either to raise as their own or to use as slaves.

After a civil war within my tribe, 90% of Creeks joined with Andrew Jackson to put down the violent "Red Stick" faction who were killing white settlers. As a reward for helping him, Jackson then turned on my tribe, burned their homes, and marched us to Oklahoma at gunpoint.

During that war, Andrew Jackson stole a Native baby from a murdered woman's arms & took the boy home for his wife to raise as their own. This was a very common story that continued into the 1960s. Reservations were mini-malls for White parents who couldn't have kids of their own.

This isn't ancient history for us. My grandfather was stolen by police from his mother's home and put in an "Indian School," had his hair cut, was beaten by teachers for speaking his language and refusing to go to their religious services. We have all been taught this history.

The unmarked graves of thousands of dead children have been discovered in both Canada AND the United States at these schools. Dead from mistreatment, disease, starvation, abuse, murder, and more. "Kill the Indian, Save the Child" was an official policy for decades.

In the 60s & 70s, White America used "welfare of the child" as a legal pretext to do it, using their total control of the "Justice" System to rule that Native parents were unfit and Native kids couldn't be adopted by other family… and so had to be adopted out to white homes.

This wasn't out of concern for Native children. They wanted to kill Native tribes and the easiest way to do that was to make sure there were no more Native children. The Indian Child Welfare Act (#ICWA) put a stop to all of that 1978. Which brings us back to the Brackeens.

The Brackeens had -already- been offered custody of their grandchild, in a deal worked out with the tribal government. So why did they sue in federal court all the way to the Supreme Court? Because it was an underhanded attack on Native tribal sovereignty funded by corporations.

The sympathetic Brackeens were recruited by Gibson-Dunn, a detestable law firm for some of America's worst corporations, including Chevron (they were responsible for the despicable treatment of @SDonziger recently), and some of the biggest gambling corporations worldwide.

Q: Why would a high-powered $5,000/hour law firm care about Native kids?

A: They don't. They wanted to destroy the entire concept of Native sovereignty on behalf of their resource extraction & gaming clients. Those clients footed the multi-million-dollar lawsuit against ICWA.

Gibson-Dunn claimed #ICWA was "racist" because it decides legal issues about child welfare based on RACE, which would be illegal… if that were true. But it's not true. Native Americans are not a RACE, tribes are SOVEREIGN governments. That's in the text of the US Constitution.

But if this case could reduce Natives to legal classification as merely just another race (like Black or Hispanic Americans) then the basis of our tribal sovereignty would also be nullified. And that's what Gibson-Dunn really wanted: to strip tribes of political power.

After all, if we aren't Sovereign, we don't have the right to operate casinos in competition with state lotteries and corporate casinos. If we aren't Sovereign, tribes don't control our reservations. That land, after all, is OWNED by the Federal Government and held "in trust."

The Federal Government could then choose what happens on those reservations. They could even sell that land without consulting the tribes. Would they? You bet. The US Government's #1 source of income isn't taxes, it's oil & mineral leases.

So Gibson-Dunn put a LOT of time and effort into this case, found sympathetic clients, sued in Republican-controlled states with NO tribes in them, solicited supporting briefs from GOP state Attorneys General (from states without tribes), and moved inexorably toward SCOTUS.

And a year, Natives everywhere have dreaded this day, because we were certain that Trump's GOP Majority was going to gleefully destroy tribal sovereignty on a 6-3 decision. Instead, today, #ICWA was upheld by the Supreme Court on a 7-2 decision. #ICWAstands

For that we have to thank (shudder) NEIL GORSUCH.

I guarantee that this case began as a 5-4 ruling in favor of the Brackeens, but Gorsuch argued Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett around to his viewpoint. As always, Thomas & Alito are ideologues who ignore evidence & arguments.

Because of his service on the Western 10th Appellate Court, Gorsuch is the first Supreme Court justice who understands Indian Law. When he's in the minority (as in another case today, Chippewa Indians v. Coughlin), Gorsuch writes blistering dissents defending tribal sovereignty.

Ketanji Brown-Jackson, by comparison, wrote the 8-1 decision which said that Bankruptcy Law overrides Native sovereignty. Which is ridiculous. I can't sue the government of France in Bankruptcy court. Gorsuch was the LONE dissenter in that case--GFY Sotomayor, Jackson, & Kagan.

When Gorsuch is in the majority opinion for cases involving Native rights, he writes separate concurring opinions that articulate a stronger defense of tribal sovereignty than the majority opinion. He did this today with ICWA. #ICWAstands because of him.

We shouldn't have to HOPE that there's a Republican on the Supreme Court who understands the law. Alito & Thomas are supposed "originalists" who don't seem to have read Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 or Article 1, Section 8, or even the 14th Amendment. We're SOVEREIGN. The End.

So yeah, we were spared. FOR NOW. But these corporations & their Republican lackeys need to realize it's not the 1930s anymore. We serve in the US military in wildly disproportionate numbers. We can buy guns now. We won't let you steal our kids or our land again. So stop trying.

ICWA was passed by a bipartisan House & Senate with hardly any opposition. What has changed in the years since? Why are Republicans so eager to kill it? It's because the GOP has become the puppets of Corporate America to the exclusion of everything else.

1 in 3 Native kids were stolen from their families before #ICWA was passed. We are NEVER going back to those days. Never. The SCOTUS did the right thing today, but we cannot trust them to always do the right thing. It's time to reform this court and remove some of their power.

If you're curious about this law and why it was needed, the Wikipedia writeup on it is pretty solid; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ch…

If you want to listen to a great podcast series about this case, check out Season 2 of THIS LAND, a podcast about Native legal issues. I'm sure I got some details wrong, so listen to the experts. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thi…

Oh, haw: "Attorney Mathew McGill runs the gaming practice for the Gibson Dunn law firm and successfully argued Murphy v. NCAA before the Supreme Court, which gave all states the ability to legalize sports betting to the detriment of tribal casinos around the country." Fuck him.

Oh, Jesus, I just read Thomas & Alito's dissents. Where to begin? Both are so corrupt and awful in equally vile yet completely different fashions! Let's start with Thomas on page 83 of this PDF: supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf…

Thomas' dissent says Congress has no power to regulate Native affairs, a position rooted in a law review article he cites. Sadly for this dumbass, that position has been thoroughly debunked. But he doesn't care! Evidence means nothing to zealots! slate.com/news-and-polit…

That article is claptrap written by a loon, and yet Thomas cites it repeatedly even though it's been brought to his attention DURING THIS CASE that its claims are incorrect. This is 40 pages of lies. Again, Thomas an ideologue who enters each case with his mind already made up.

Alito's dissent begins on pp. 123. His dissent is a pean to the White Savior. He insists that if Congress actually cared about Native children, it would let Texas remove them from their tribes and place them with “loving” white families. Such a f-ing racist scumbag. Breathtaking.

It's time to expand this court. It's time to remove some of their power. It's time to impose an ethics code upon them. It's time to #ReformTheCourt. Democrats have no taste for this fight yet, so we must prod them at every turn, or else they will surrender to institutionalism.