Advocates and legal experts say that Maverick Gaming, LLC v. United States, et al. and other cases like it threaten a return to the Termination Era policies of the 1950s, when the U.S. government sought to end the political status of Indigenous tribes forever. The most prominent of the cases, argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in November, focuses on the right of Native American families to have preference over non-Native families in the adoption placements of Native kids. As in the Maverick case, the plaintiffs in Brackeen v. Haaland claim the preference is based on race, rather than the political sovereignty of tribal nations. A ruling in their favor could fundamentally rewrite the way the U.S. government regards tribal nations, casting policies created by treaty or agreements between sovereign nations in doubt.
