During a Wednesday debate, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) made an off-the-cuff invite for leaders of the state's 39 tribes to meet with him on Thursday.

Ultimately, he was stood up, according to Secretary of State and Native American Affairs Brian Bingman.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Oklahoma can prosecute non-Native Americans who commit crimes against Native Americans on tribal lands – reversing a prior ruling that expanded tribal authority in the state. 

The case stemmed from a state court decision to throw out the conviction against Victor Castro-Huerta, who is not Native American. Oklahoma prosecutors charged Castro-Huerta with malnourishment of his disabled 5-year-old stepdaughter, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. 

In the wake of a recent report on the harms of 19th- and 20th-century Indian boarding schools, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a cross-country tour called The Road to Healing, during which survivors of the boarding-school system could share their stories. If healing is what Ms. Haaland wants, though, this strategy will likely disappoint.

A congressional hearing Thursday on Democratic Rep. Jared Golden’s bill to allow Maine’s tribes to benefit from all future federal Indian laws received a mixed reception, with the ranking Republican expressing concern about Congress acting without Maine’s consent.

In a stunning blow to Oklahoma’s state government, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that much of eastern Oklahoma is located on an Indian reservation.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices declared that Congress never diminished or disestablished the land as a reservation. Major crimes committed by a tribal member on their own reservation, in effect, must be prosecuted by the federal government in accordance with the Major Crimes Act.

The story of Covid's trajectory isn’t blue to red. It’s Black and brown.

As the virus has shifted from coastal big cities to conservative states, political pundits and analysts have declared that “Trump country” is under siege.

But the politicization of the pandemic hides an enduring reality: It’s Black, Latino and Native American populations that are bearing the brunt of the disease.

A second South Dakota tribal leader called for the removal of the four sculptures on Mount Rushmore, which is carved into land sacred to the Lakota Sioux.

"Nothing stands as a greater reminder to the Great Sioux Nation of a country that cannot keep a promise or treaty than the faces carved into our sacred land on what the United States calls Mount Rushmore,” Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier said in a statement, according to USA Today.

Long before a global pandemic swept across her cloistered corner of the Navajo Nation, Cynthia Wilson knew the pains many families took to secure and store food.

The multigenerational home she shares with her parents and eight others in Monument Valley, Utah, runs on solar panels and a generator. With no running water, her father hauls it in almost daily. They live about 8 miles from the closest and only grocery store in their high desert community, where shoppers have felt the strain of limited supplies through the rationing of foods like meat.

Sioux tribes in the US state of South Dakota are refusing to remove coronavirus checkpoints they set up on roads which pass through their land.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem wrote to several tribal leaders last week saying the checkpoints were illegal.

But the Sioux say they are the only way of making sure the virus does not enter their reservations.

Their limited healthcare facilities would not be able to cope with an outbreak, they say.

The Department of the Interior has worked steadily to increase opportunity and access to the federal lands and resources under its purview. Earlier this week, the department released a comprehensive list of its accomplishments thus far in 2018.

One area that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke should now turn his attention to is the morass of bad policies that have for years restricted opportunity for Native Americans on their own lands.