By the Fire We Carry
The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
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- 20,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year • An Esquire Best Book of Fall 2024 • A Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year • A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
"Impeccably researched. . . . A fascinating book and an important one.” — Washington Post
“[A] brilliant, kaleidoscopic debut. . . . A showstopper.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Nagle reports in her brilliant, kaleidoscopic debut on the legal battles leading up to Sharp v. Murphy, the startling 2020 Supreme Court decision that upheld the terms of a 19th-century treaty granting the Muscogee Nation land for resettlement in Oklahoma. "I wrote this book because I wanted the story of this historic Supreme Court decision to be well documented," but also "to catalog the cruelty of what brushed aside" in popular discussion of the case, Nagle explains. She interweaves the complex courtroom drama with an empathetic, harrowing recap of the 1999 murder of George Jacobs by Patrick Murphy, the case which revealed that the Muscogee Nation's reservation had never officially been dissolved. Another strand traces the history of the 19th-century forced removal of Native peoples from the Southeast to Oklahoma, including Nagle's own ancestor, Cherokee Nation leader Major Ridge, who was among those who signed away the Cherokee homeland and was murdered for the perceived betrayal. This family saga is the most complex and rewarding part of the story; Major Ridge hoped the relocation would save his people's lives, as President Andrew Jackson (a nefarious presence in Nagle's story) had threatened to chase them "into the sea." Nagle's narrative is lucid and moving, especially as she uses archival sources to recreate the mounting terror experienced by Native peoples in the Southeast as violent mobs of outsiders swarmed onto their land. It's a showstopper.
