You Are the Boss of Your Choices

Recently, the world lost an historic figure in the annals of human history — Queen Elizabeth II. She was crowned the Queen of the United Kingdom and a Sovereign 15 years before I was born. And she was the Queen and Sovereign for 70 years! She exemplified to the world how a “sovereign” can reign with dignity and endure hardships and have a positive impact for future generations.

How often have we heard her referred to as a “sovereign” and given it little thought? Growing up in Oklahoma, I heard that same word in Native American circles too — “our sovereignty,” “the tribe’s sovereignty.” For many families then, it could feel far from the daily fight for a decent life, and the word stayed abstract. But I was listening from the next desk, not from inside the Nation — and over time I came to see that the abstraction was real power, just not always visible in the everyday bills and jobs.

My friends and classmates would laugh and joke that they “should be their own sovereign” — still, like me, with little grip on what the word truly meant, or on the difference between a Nation’s sovereignty and a person’s plain right to free agency.

Eventually the word took on a harder edge for me — especially after 2020, when the Supreme Court decided McGirt v. Oklahoma.

What the Court actually held was narrower than the speeches that followed. Jimcy McGirt, a Seminole and Creek citizen, had been convicted in an Oklahoma state court of serious crimes. He argued that the place where they happened was still the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation, that Congress had never formally disestablished it, and that under the federal Major Crimes Act a case like his — against an Indian in “Indian country” — belongs in federal court. The Court agreed, five to four. Allotment and statehood, it said, were not enough to erase a reservation. For that law, the reservation was still there.

That is not Sequoyah, and it is not a sixth state. It is not a ruling that every right of every Nation was “never lost” in every kind of case — sister fights over taxes and hunting have since gone their own ways. What McGirt did say is the principle worth teaching, in Justice Gorsuch’s words: “If Congress wishes to withdraw its promises, it must say so.” A promise does not dissolve just because keeping it became inconvenient.

Chief Justice Roberts, in dissent, reached back to the assimilation era and to how thoroughly the land had already been taken — citing the Court’s old account in Woodward v. De Graffenried of “enterprising citizens” who had “appropriate[d] to their exclusive use almost the entire property of the Territory,” until “the poorer class of Indians” could not secure enough land for houses and farms. Put plainly, it was an argument that the taking had lasted so long that it must now be legally gone. The majority refused to “elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law.” A wrong that succeeds is still a wrong.

So the political map of eastern Oklahoma shifted — for certain defendants and certain major crimes. Governors felt it as a hole punched in the state’s exclusive courts. Nations felt it as proof that the old reservation had not quietly died in 1907. Both can be true at once. And neither one turns a Mekko into a governor, or a citizen into a queen.

That last line holds the whole idea. There are really three kinds of “sovereign,” and they are easy to confuse — a monarch, a Nation, and a person — with very different definitions, complexities, and realities. Even a sovereign like Queen Elizabeth came with guardrails, rules, and regulations, as does any kind of sovereignty.

Queen Elizabeth, as a sovereign, was more of an institution than a ruler. She held limited power, if any at all. But because of her moral integrity, she carried a great deal of influence — something worth learning from and using ourselves.

Tribal sovereignty is something else again. It was never instituted by the federal government. It was always “here” — older than the United States itself — and only later hemmed in by U.S. legislation and law. Even so, it means real autonomy, and it commands respect. It includes many aspects of self-determination: determining citizenship; running a government and making its laws; dealing directly with the United States, nation to nation; holding and governing land and assets; and, increasingly, authority over a Nation’s data, language, and the “whether, how, and when” of their use.

At the same time, tribal sovereignty is not the same as the Crown. There is no “fount of honour,” and it does not sit above Congress. It does not carry unlimited power. Congress and the federal courts have spent two hundred years carving its edges — plenary power, trust duty, Public Law 280 fights, gaming compacts, and Oklahoma’s own particular history. A Nation, whatever its size — a few hundred people or many thousands — feels every one of those limits. It cannot make treaties with foreign countries, and its authority over non-members is narrowed by federal law. Nor is it a shield against ordinary taxes: its citizens still pay the taxes the law says they pay, and still answer to state and federal criminal law in the ways the courts have drawn. The tribal government is sovereign. Its members are citizens of the Tribe/Nation and of the United States.

The advantage is collective political existence. A Nation can pass a resolution, refuse a vendor, site or reject a warehouse, keep its enrollment off a chatbot — as a government. A private person cannot do any of that and call it “tribal sovereignty.”

And a private person shouldn’t try. Bodily autonomy, conscience, the property the law already recognizes, the right to say no to a contract, to keep family knowledge out of a public model, to pull the plug on an account that is yours — that is liberty under law, plus discipline. It is not a throne. It is not personal sovereignty. Personal “sovereignty” has no legal standing. What a person truly holds is free agency — self-determination within the boundaries of the law where they live. And though none of us will ever be a legal sovereign like Queen Elizabeth II, any of us can choose to live as she did — as a steady example — protecting our own rights, and honoring the rights and dignity of a Nation’s sovereignty.

The Queen was an office with a crown. A Nation is an office with a Mekko. And you are a person with a delete key. That is enough.

And today that sovereignty has a new frontier. We live in the age of artificial intelligence, where a Nation’s data, its language, and its knowledge can be gathered, copied, and fed into a machine in an instant. Here the old principle holds with new force: the Nation — not a vendor, not a chatbot, not a model — decides whose data, whose language, and “whether, how, and when” a machine may touch them. That is tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century, and it is worth protecting with the same care as any acre of land.

And it is true for each of us as well. You may never occupy a legal throne like Queen Elizabeth II’s, and if you are a citizen of a Nation, that government — not you as a private person — is the sovereign. But you are, and always will be, the Boss of your own choices — of what you share and what you keep, of what you hand over and what you hold back. Guard that with discipline. Honor a Nation’s sovereignty the same way, if it is yours to honor. Data sovereignty, in the end, is how both a Nation and a person stay the Boss of what’s theirs in this century — and it is good for all of us.