PAWHUSKA, OK – The Osage Nation Attorney General’s Office has filed in the Federal Northern District of Oklahoma requesting relief from the Irby decision. The filing is part of an ongoing legal battle to reassert that the Osage Nation reservation was never disestablished and remains intact.
After considerable effort before the Oklahoma state courts, the Osage Nation has taken another important step toward correcting the injustice inflicted in 2010 by the federal Osage Nation v. Irby case, in which the federal courts found the Nation’s reservation to have been disestablished. The Nation has never accepted the validity of this ruling. On January 2, 2025, the Nation returned to the federal district court for the Northern District of Oklahoma to request relief from the Irby judgment under Federal Rule 60(b).
The Nation believes that the United States Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma makes clear that the earlier Irby decision is irretrievably flawed and must be vacated. In Irby, the courts improperly inferred disestablishment from a selective reading of history; McGirt makes clear that a reservation is only disestablished if Congress says so in federal law. The Nation trusts that the courts will follow the direction provided by the Supreme Court and put an end to this difficult part of their collective history.
“The decision in Osage Nation v. Irby was and is completely indefensible,” said Osage Nation Attorney General Clint Patterson. “The Osage Nation has the best case for a reservation. The Osage Nation purchased our reservation with our funds in 1872, and an act of Congress has never disestablished it. In their opinion, the 10th Circuit wrote exactly that before going to some extrinsic sources of history. The McGirt decision highlights the flaws in the Irby decision, and this motion gives us a chance to fix those flaws.”
