By the Fire We Carry

The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

By: Rebecca Nagle

Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

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 ‘90s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land over a century later.

Before 2020, Native American 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, the U.S. government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples. That changed on July 9, 2020, when a high-profile Supreme Court case—which originated with a small-town murder two decades earlier—affirmed the reservation of Muscogee Nation. The ruling resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history, merely because the Court chose to follow the law.

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 their land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed.

Over a century later, when a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen, his defence attorneys argued the murder occurred on reservation land. This would mean the State of Oklahoma didn't have the jurisdiction to execute him. But, the State still held that the reservation no longer existed. This case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where in 2020 the justices ruled on the side of the Muscogee nation. Their ruling would ultimately affirm the existence of multiple reservations covering half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle's own Cherokee Nation.

Here Rebecca Nagle tells the story of 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.

©2024 Rebecca Nagle (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

‘In a fiery account as chilling as a legal thriller, Rebecca Nagle lays bare centuries of injustice in Oklahoma and the southeastern lands from which the American government exiled her ancestors and thousands of other Indigenous peoples. By the Fire We Carry is a clear and courageous call for justice’

TIYA MILES, author of All That She Carried

‘This is great storytelling, dogged reporting, and a compelling personal tale all wrapped in a book that should live for years to come’

TIMOTHY EGAN, author of A Fever in the Heartland

‘Nagle brings us face-to-face with personal and collective histories and their consequences in a multigenerational story of corruption, betrayal, and the enduring strength of Native resistance. This book is enlightening, enraging, inspiring, and impossible to put down’

IJEOMA OLUO, author of So You Want to Talk About Race

‘This is brilliant journalism and exceptional history. In the best tradition of social justice writing, it challenges the head, breaks the heart, and offers hope for the future’

PHILIP J. DELORIA, Dakota descent, author of Becoming Mary Sully

‘Part legal page-turner, part her own compelling family saga, and part eloquent lament for the horrific way our nation has treated Native Americans over the centuries, Rebecca Nagle’s By the Fire We Carry has also given us something exceedingly rare—a story about Native Americans in the Supreme Court in which the good guys actually win’

ADAM COHEN, author of Supreme Inequality