On July 4, 2026, the United States turns 250.

The celebrations are planned. The commissions are funded. The speeches are drafted. Every state has a committee. The National Park Service has programming. The Smithsonian has exhibits.

The document being celebrated — the Declaration of Independence — contains this language in its twenty-seventh grievance against King George III:

“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

That is in the founding document. Not a footnote. Not an amendment later repealed. The text. The one they’ll read aloud on the steps of buildings in twelve days.

The institution charged with interpreting the Constitution born from that Declaration is the Supreme Court of the United States. In 250 years, it has heard hundreds of cases involving tribal nations. The arc of those cases is not complicated. It is a ratchet. It turns one direction.

In 1832, Worcester v. Georgia established the bright-line rule: state laws have no force in Indian country. Chief Justice Marshall wrote it. The principle was clear. President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce it. The Trail of Tears followed.

That was the high-water mark. The rule lasted fifty years before the Court itself began dismantling it.

McBratney (1882): states can prosecute crimes on reservations. Kagama (1886): federal power over tribes justified not by the Constitution but by “wardship” — tribes as wards of the nation, a doctrine invented to fill a gap the text didn’t authorize. Oliphant (1978): tribes stripped of criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians on their own land. The Court acknowledged tribes had never surrendered this power. It divested them of it anyway, based on what it called “common notions” drawn from the removal, allotment, and termination eras — the eras when federal policy was explicitly eliminationist.

The legal term is “implicit divestiture.” Tribes can lose sovereign powers without a treaty, without legislation, without even knowing it happened. The Court decides what sovereignty tribes implicitly gave up by continuing to exist inside a nation that absorbed them without asking.

Montana v. United States (1981) stripped tribal civil jurisdiction over non-Indians on fee land within reservation boundaries. The exceptions it created are so vague that Justice Douglas observed the only beneficiaries of federal Indian law were “those who benefit from confusion.” Justice Scalia was more direct: “Most of the time, we’re just making it up.”

He was not joking.

Theodore Roosevelt called the General Allotment Act “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” The Court validated the engine. Ninety million acres lost. Over a hundred tribes terminated outright during the 1950s — not defeated in war, not bought out, just legislatively declared to no longer exist.

The executive and legislative branches reversed course fifty years ago. Nixon rejected termination. The Indian Self-Determination Act passed in 1975. Every president since has, at minimum, voiced support for tribal sovereignty. The Supreme Court did not follow. Under Chief Justice Rehnquist, tribal nations won 29 percent of their cases. Under Chief Justice Roberts, that number dropped to 18 percent.

The pattern is consistent enough that a Washington University Law Review article published last year named it: judicial imperialism. Not interpretation. Not conservatism. Imperialism — the conscious expansion of state power over sovereign nations using jurisprudence rooted in racist nineteenth-century doctrine that the political branches abandoned decades ago.

Into this, a concession.

The Tribal Supreme Court Project — a joint initiative of the Native American Rights Fund and the National Congress of American Indians — turns 25 this year. When it started in 2001, tribal nations were losing 80 percent of their Supreme Court cases. In the last decade, they’ve won 70 percent. Three hundred volunteer attorneys, academics, and tribal representatives built a coordinated legal infrastructure where none existed. The September celebration in Washington will bring together tribal leaders, elected officials, and the attorneys who reversed a losing streak that had lasted generations.

That reversal is real. Haaland v. Brackeen (2023) upheld ICWA 7-2. McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) confirmed the Creek Reservation was never disestablished — the most significant tribal sovereignty ruling in decades. These are not symbolic. They are structural.

And they exist inside a Court that, in the same period, decided Castro-Huerta (2022) to expand state criminal jurisdiction over crimes against Native people on tribal land, and Callais (2026) to gut the Voting Rights Act’s effects test — the tool tribes used to fight gerrymandering. The same building. The same bench. The ratchet loosened on one case, tightened on the next.

The Tribal Supreme Court Project’s 25th anniversary falls inside America’s 250th. That is not a coincidence anyone planned. But it is a ratio worth sitting with.

Twenty-five years of coordinated legal defense. Against 250 years of the institution it defends against.

The Declaration called them savages. The Court built a doctrine that strips their sovereignty without their knowledge or consent. The political branches reversed course and the judiciary kept going. The project that reversed the losing streak will celebrate in September. The country that wrote “merciless Indian Savages” into its founding document will celebrate twelve days from now.

Both celebrations are earned. Neither cancels the other.

The document will be read aloud. The grievance will be in it. The question is whether anyone reads all twenty-seven.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: Indian Country Today, Washington University Law Review, Native American Rights Fund, Native News Online