By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
‘Breathtaking… a triumph’ NOREEN MASUD
‘A fiery account as chilling as a legal thriller’ TIYA MILES
‘Compellingly told and deeply researched’ CAROLINE DODDS PENNOCK
A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids together 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. By contrast, nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests – in the emergence of the United States as a nation, the 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 that 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 would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including the author’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
'Breathtaking: essential reading for anyone yet to understand who US law exists to serve, and who it exists to exploit. Nagle’s book achieves impeccable balance; it’s a call for hope which still never loses sight of the labour and blood underpinning every victory in this rigged system. A triumph' -
NOREEN MASUD, author of A Flat Place -
'Compellingly told and deeply researched, Nagle's timely work brilliantly reveals the sweeping and yet profoundly personal consequences of ongoing Indigenous struggles for sovereignty' -
CAROLINE DODDS PENNOCK, author of On Savage Shores -
‘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 -