by Rebecca Nagle
Harper
9/10/2024, hardcover
SKU: 9780063112049
A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later
Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests--in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.
In the 1830s Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn't have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling that would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle's own Cherokee Nation.
Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.
Reviews:
"By The Fire We Carry is history come alive, an intelligent and personal story about justice. Rebecca Nagle is at her best as a deft journalist and storyteller."
-- Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future
"Nagle is skilled at explaining the intricacies of the legal arguments in terms that a layperson can understand. . . . She compellingly describes not only the historical wrongs committed against Indigenous peoples, but also how we can't excuse those wrongs by assuming that they were acceptable to their contemporaries because of some kind of lesser moral standard. . . . Impeccably researched. . . . A fascinating book and an important one." -- Washington Post
"A narrative as propulsive and affecting as it is infuriating." -- Vanity Fair
"Nagle's gripping historical and legal chronicle sheds light on a centuries-long struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and tribal land in Oklahoma." -- New York Times Book Review
About the Author:
Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and a citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is the writer and host of the podcast This Land. Her writing on Native representation, federal Indian law, and tribal sovereignty has been featured in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, USA Today, Indian Country Today, and other publications. She is a Peabody Award nominee and the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, Women's Media Center's Exceptional Journalism Award, and numerous honors from the Native American Journalist Association. Nagle lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.