Conclusion

The book’s conclusion returns us to the McGirt v. Oklahoma decision of 2020. The US federal government and the State of Oklahoma have emphasized that the decision primarily applies to criminal jurisdiction, policing and surveillance, and little else. By understanding McGirt in conversation with two of the most popular TV shows of 2019 and 2020, Watchmen (2019) and Live PD (2016–), we can think through the ways Indian Territory, especially Tulsa, figures in a larger twenty-first-century cultural imaginary that invokes long-standing discourses of US intervention into tribal affairs, as well as the criminalization of Blackness and Indigeneity.