In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the enduring existence of the Muscogee (Creek) reservation and, derivatively, tribal criminal jurisdiction over a vast portion of eastern Oklahoma, including Tulsa. The case, McGirt v. Oklahoma, prompted immediate backlash from state officials, who claimed that the decision would cause millions to face uncertain economic realities and undermine extractive industry investment. Oklahoma’s Governor, Kevin Stitt, declared that “[b]usinesses need certainty, and if we want businesses to locate in Oklahoma, they have to know what the rules are to locate here.” The ruling, he warned, would destroy Oklahoma—even claiming that the decision was “tearing the state apart.” These arguments were replicated in the State’s briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sought to overturn McGirt on the basis of the case’s supposed practical implications. And in 2022, in Castro-Huerta v. Oklahoma, the Court eventually embraced the idea that tribal jurisdiction should be limited, and the state’s power in Indian Country expanded, in part to mitigate such fears of uncertainty.
Today, the attack on tribal governance in Oklahoma continues. In Stroble v. Oklahoma, which is pending before the Supreme Court in a writ of certiorari, Oklahoma argues that the state has the authority to tax the income of Muscogee citizens who work and live on lands within the territory recognized as a Muscogee reservation. This claim, the petitioners rightly note, goes against longstanding precedents, which “categorically hold that a State cannot ‘assert tax jurisdiction’ over ‘tribal members living and working on land set aside for those members’ absent congressional approval.” To justify this practice, the state once again draws on the idea that depriving the state authority over the lands would have “serious ‘disruptive practical consequences’ for the State of Oklahoma and its citizens.” Thus, in Stroble, the concerted resistance to McGirt, couched in the language of economic impracticability, continues into the realm of tribal civil jurisdiction.
The backlash to the tribal jurisdiction granted by McGirt represents an instance of a much broader yet often overlooked phenomenon: settler retrenchment. Settler retrenchment, as I use the term here, refers to a precise form of backlash against Indigenous power and sovereignty following significant legal victories. Such retrenchment is borderless and widespread, and guided by a desire to fortify the historical mythology and material dominance core to settler states. In this post, which is a part of a larger forthcoming project on settler retrenchment, I examine the particular deployment of economic arguments to undermine Indigenous legal victories. Specifically, this post shows how economic anxieties are weaponized to foment popular resistance to the claims of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, settler governments reframe their obligations to engage in treatymaking and power-sharing, while also eliding their responsibility to remediate their original theft of Native lands.
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In developing the idea of settler retrenchment, I am indebted to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of racial retrenchment, which sought to explain the risk-reward of Black engagement with the institutions of American racial hegemony. When faced with “a serious ideological challenge to white supremacy,” she argues, dominant institutions are pushed to act “only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction” between American mythology and the reality of racial oppression. However, Crenshaw also observes that reforms intended to promote racial equality often provoke political backlash, as white society is generally conditioned to view remedial measures “as illegitimate or unnecessary.” Retrenchment, then, is the narrowing of the initial legal advancement in response to this backlash.
In settler colonial contexts, a similar process unfolds when Indigenous groups achieve a legal decision that recognizes their sovereignty, jurisdiction, or collective rights. Here, law deviates from the dominant ideology of Indigenous erasure, a product of genocidal histories that treats settlers as the only valid occupiers and owners of land. In turn, the status quo arrangement of legal, political, and economic power is unsettled, undermining the prototypical settler state mythology that Indigenous groups lack contemporary relevance.
Although multiple rhetorical ploys are enlisted to mobilize publics and institutions against Indigenous sovereignty in response to these decisions, a notably common argument is that Native rights are incompatible with the stability of the state and its economy. The potency of these economic arguments, Carole Blackburn argues, is due to the emotive role of certainty in settler societies, as Indigenous claims are perceived as destabilizing “to capital and state sovereignty.” Eva Mackey elaborates that “settler entitlement” and a desire for settler “certainty in land, property, and settler futures” is a predictable feature of societies built on the assumption that “settlers and the settler nation-state [] have certain and settled entitlement to the land taken from Indigenous peoples.” Additionally, corporations, seizing on these feelings of insecurity, frequently present Indigenous rights as interfering with expeditious development and extraction.
A recent example illustrates the relationship between the state, capital, and settler backlash. In August 2025, in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada, the Supreme Court of British Columbia recognized the Aboriginal title of the Cowichan Tribes. In 1853, the Cowichan (or Quw’utsun) were promised just treatment and land protection by the Crown. The lands in question were intended to become a reserve for the tribes, but instead were covertly sold, leading to today’s dispute over title.
Aboriginal title, as defined by the court, is “a sui generis interest, grounded in the regular and exclusive use of land.” When tribes are able to demonstrate that they exclusively, sufficiently, and continuously occupied the lands in question at the time of the Crown’s initial assertion of sovereignty, their Aboriginal title can be recognized. As a result, those tribes are able to “retain[] the right to use and control the land and to reap any benefits flowing from it.” Courts generally require governments work with the tribe(s) to reconcile any competing land interests. Here, the Cowichan Tribes achieved affirmation of their Aboriginal interest in public lands held by the City of Richmond, Canada, and the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority. Regarding privately owned land, the court determined that British Columbia “owes a duty to the Cowichan to negotiate in good faith reconciliation of the Crown granted fee simple interests held by third parties.”
It did not take long for backlash to materialize, grounded in the language of uncertainty and economic impracticability. Despite evidence of past collaboration and co-management arrangements between Indigenous groups and fee simple landholders, the City of Richmond communicated to its residents that Aboriginal title and fee simple title are totally incompatible. A memo sent to individual property owners promised that the city will make arguments to this effect—stipulating that fee simple ownership cannot coexist with an Aboriginal land interest. Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie also asserted that “this decision… cannot be allowed to stand” because it risks undermining the country’s entire land ownership regime. British Columbia Premier David Eby lamented the “significant uncertainty” caused by the decision, while Steve Kooner, a Member of the Legislative Assembly for Richmond-Queensborough, claimed the decision “put jobs, investments and entire communities at risk.” Corporations and developers blamed Cowichan for cancelled investments, even where some projects were not located in the territory under dispute.
Unfortunately, there is evidence these arguments have successfully convinced the public. Some residents of Richmond fear they could be forced to move and abandon their private property. And according to a recent poll, a majority of BC residents believe the decision harms, instead of advances, the country’s reconciliation program with Indigenous peoples.
These extreme claims run counter to the explicit intent of the Cowichan Tribes, who assert that their goal is not to invalidate the ownership of private landowners. They also contradict the well-established practice of government collaboration with Indigenous peoples to ensure a just solution to title disputes. By exacerbating and then privileging the unfounded and constructed fears of non-Native property owners, the government has effectively shifted the political burden of responsibility: it is now the Tribes who must turn down the temperature and are forced to yield to the interests of non-Natives. This demand is especially egregious given that “endless denials of Indigenous Title, rather than [] meaningful and lasting engagement, [] produced this contentious moment in B.C.’s land politics.”
To agents of backlash, however, the truth is not germane. Arguments about economic uncertainty—despite being greatly exaggerated and often not grounded in reality—have significant purchase in facilitating settler retrenchment. Narratives of economic uncertainty are a tool that governments use to reassert the status quo when courts deviate from the mythology of Indigenous irrelevance. This “builds new injustice upon old ones,” in the words of Ann Tweedy. Meanwhile, as tribes continue pressing for recognition of their inherent rights, it becomes the work of others to counter backlash narratives that could mature into retrenchment. If we are to reconcile the legalized injustice of colonial plunder with entrenched property and economic regimes, a degree of uncertainty is inevitable. But embracing this discomfort—and working directly with those whose land rights are finally recognized—has the potential to unlock transformative possibilities.
