Murders draw attention to confusing legal jurisdictions in Native American reservations

Yakama Reservation, in pink.
(Yakama Nation Wildlife Program map)

A 2019 shooting that left five dead has called attention to the often-confusing patchwork of legal jurisdictions on Native American reservations that leaves many residents feeling unprotected. "The tangled web of jurisdictional issues that plague Indian Country . . . have hindered investigations of cases ranging from murders to drugs to missing indigenous women," Mary Hudetz reports for The Seattle Times.

The shooting happened on June 8 in White Swan, a town of under 1,000 in the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington state. Even before the shooting, Yakama tribal leaders had begged for more federal help to combat drug trafficking and property crime. "And they denounced the Washington State Patrol’s 2016 decision to stop patrolling the 1,765-square-mile reservation — an area larger than the size of Rhode Island — due to liability concerns amid a shifting web of jurisdictions," Hudetz reports.

Tribal leaders want Washington state government to cede the authority it claimed over the reservation almost 60 years ago; they're frustrated that state officials have want to keep legal authority over tribal lands but won't allow troopers to patrol the area, Hudetz reports. The tribe says it has one or two officers and sheriff's deputies to cover large portions of the reservation.

Meanwhile, justice is moving slowly in the White Swan shooting. James Dean Cloud and his brother Donovan Cloud have been held since June on charges related to the killings, but federal prosecutors didn't file charges in the case until last week. Even then, James Dean Cloud was the only one named in the first-degree murder charge against only one of the victims. Prosecutors "have not said whether more charges are coming in connection with the other deaths," Hudetz reports.