Ex Tribal Lawyer Who Clashed With Governor Confirmed to US Court

Sara Hill, who served as the top lawyer for the Cherokee Nation, won bipartisan confirmation to a US trial court in Oklahoma where she’ll be one of the few American Indian judges in federal judiciary history.

The Senate voted 52-14 on Tuesday to send the tribe’s former attorney general to the US District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma.

Oklahoma’s Republican senators James Lankford and Markwayne Mullin have supported Hill’s nomination despite opposition from Gov. Kevin Stitt, also a Republican. He’s questioned Hill’s ability to be unbiased in matters related to her advocacy around a US Supreme Court decision that’s overhauled prosecutions on tribal lands in the state.

Hill, who’s been in private practice most recently, will replace Claire Eagan, the first woman appointed to the Tulsa-based court. Eagan took senior status, a form of semi-retirement, in October 2022.

Friends and peers say Hill as a judge will be capable of remaining dispassionate in high stakes situations.

“You can’t work on behalf of your own tribe without working on emotionally and intellectually complex issues,” said Stephen Greetham, former senior counsel to the Chickasaw Nation, who’s frequently allied with Hill on tribal issues. “And the analytical dispassion that she can combine with a sense of right and wrong, at a core level, is something that I think is going to be such an asset for the federal bench.”

Hill’s appointment reflects President Joe Biden’s premium on expanding diversity in the judiciary. Hill would be the fourth American Indian judge appointed by Biden and the first American Indian woman to serve on any federal court in Oklahoma.

At the time of Hill’s nomination, the court with an expanding caseload only had two active judges, one of whom splits time between all three district courts in the state.

Two Clients

Hill, 46, graduated from the University of Tulsa School of Law. She launched her legal career as an assistant attorney general for the tribe, working as a prosecutor in its legal system and in state courts aiming to ensure the appropriate foster placement and care of American Indian children according to the Indian Child Welfare Act.

A touchstone of Hill’s career has been environmental, natural resource, and land management issues, which she handled both in the Cherokee attorney general’s office and as the tribe’s first secretary of natural resources in 2015.

In Oklahoma and Cherokee Nation v. Sequoyah Fuels Corp., she successfully secured the safe disposal of radioactive waste from an uranium processing site which threatened to contaminate the Cherokee Nation’s local water supply.

Between 2014 and 2015, Hill had a brief stint as a special assistant US attorney in the Northern District of Oklahoma, prosecuting crimes committed in Indian Country on behalf of the federal government.

Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation Chuck Hoskin Jr. said Hill represented the tribe as attorney general during “one of the most challenging times” in its history. She helped it navigate the early months of the pandemic, whether ensuring that the Cherokee Nation was receiving adequate federal funding under the Cares Act to understanding the tribal government’s authority to mandate certain public health measures.

“That was a lot, but she always was there with the answer. She was always there with the analysis,” Hoskin told Bloomberg Law.

Hill also helped to secure the first of its kind $75 million settlement with drug distributors in 2021 over the opioid crisis that the Nation alleged disproportionately harmed members of the Cherokee community.

McGirt Aftermath

Hill in her new job will continue dealing with fallout from the US Supreme Court’s 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision. That ruling limited the scope of the state’s prosecution power for certain crimes committed by members of American Indian tribes on their lands, turning jurisdiction over to the federal and tribal governments.

The Northern District of Oklahoma trial court saw a 66% increase in criminal cases filed between 2020 and 2021, and a 28% increase between 2021 and 2022, according to Lankford, who voted for Hill’s confirmation while Mullin was recorded as not voting although he voiced support for her previously.

Federal and tribal law enforcement agencies across the state—including Hill’s office while she was Cherokee attorney general—also had to handle an influx of criminal cases.

Although hailed by tribes as a long-overdue affirmation of their sovereignty, the newfound expansion of their jurisdiction came with unprecedented challenges for the limited capacity of their criminal justice systems.

Hill oversaw the initial expansion of the tribal prosecutor’s office and navigated how to handle a growing incarcerated population.

McGirt has led to a series of legal challenges that don’t appear to be slowing and continue to test Oklahoma’s federal-state-tribal law enforcement regime.

It has also led to increased tensions between tribes and Stitt, who described McGirt as an existential threat to the future of Oklahoma.

Two years later in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, the justices decided that the federal government and the state have concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed by non-Natives against tribal members in Indian Country.

Cool Head

Hill, who co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of the Cherokee Nation in McGirt, filed another in the follow-up case.

Stitt has been critical of her advocacy on this issue. In McGirt, Castro-Huerta, and other cases, he says she has sided with the perpetrators of violence against children in favor of throwing the state’s law enforcement landscape into chaos.

But Hill has maintained that protecting and affirming tribal sovereignty has always been the Cherokee Nation’s position and later recognized after the McGirt decision the need for tribes and the state to work together given tribal resource gaps.

Hoskin said Hill kept a cool head in clashes with Stitt’s office while representing the sovereignty and jurisdictional interests of the Cherokee Nation as attorney general. She was at times a calming presence for the principal chief during the most tense exchanges with the governor, Hoskin said.

Debate to Lawyer

Hill was born in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, but was raised in the Choctaw Nation’s city of Stigler. Her mother, a retired head librarian of the Stigler Public Library, stressed the importance of education with Hill and her siblings.

Hill said she realized she wanted to become an attorney during high school, after trying out for the debate team.

“From the moment I made my first argument, I knew that this was something that I wanted to do as a career. It was instantaneous,” she told the Stigler News-Sentinel in 2014.