By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

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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 Forestsin 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 didnt 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 Nagles own Cherokee Nation. 

Reviews

"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 cant 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

Author Bio

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, Womens Media Centers Exceptional Journalism Award, and numerous honors from the Native American Journalist Association.