By the Fire We Carry
The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year • An NPR 2024 “Books We Loved” Pick • 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
At times dark, this history of 200 years of Indigenous struggles for human rights in the Midwest shows that the arc of the moral universe can actually bend toward justice. By the Fire We Carry stitches together two historical events to epitomize this battle: the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Muscogee people to Oklahoma in the 1800s, and 2020’s McGirt v. Oklahoma Supreme Court case, granting that same nation its own sovereignty. Legal journalist Rebecca Nagle’s firsthand experience reporting on the McGirt case gives this history a uniquely personal touch, allowing her to convey the daily injustices felt by Native Americans. Nagle impressively balances sobering historical research and facts with the fiery emotions around the McGirt case and the adjacent murder trial that led into it. Whether you’re a history buff or just passionate about seeing marginalized peoples fight back and win, By the Fire We Carry is phenomenally inspiring and informative.
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.
