I think it's significant that Native Americans for the most part insist they aren't a racial or ethnic group because, by objective standards, they are not.

Lots of contemporary Americans have this sort of half baked idea that Native American tribes were at one time closely interrelated and shared common culture and languages. This is not even remotely true.

North America is vast, and in pre-columbian times featured ethnic groups and cultures that were if anything more diverse and disconnected than cultures that existed in Eurasia.

Some Native American languages are so disconnected from one another that historical linguists believe they separated so long ago that they make European languages like Basque and Spanish look like kissing cousins. (Basque is a language isolate that was probably spoken by Neolithic Iberians long before Indo-European speakers were glints in their grandpappies' eyes.)

White Americans think of Native Americans in ethnic and racial terms, but Native Americans I know tell me that's nonsense.

Shared political goals and resistance to the U.S. (and Canada, Brazil, etc) breaking treaties binds them together in a common cause.

Esteemed justices of the Supreme Court ought to be smart enough to understand this. If they're not, they certainly have experts available to educate them.

But as we saw with justices misrepresenting and lying about American history when overturned Roe earlier this year, history and expertise don't matter so much anymore.

The court is politically and ideologically compromised.