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 • A National Book Critics Circle Finalist • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction 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. 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, Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Award, and numerous honors from the Native American Journalist Association. Nagle lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Indigenous communities deserve the same standard of journalism as the rest of the country, but rarely receive it from non-Native media outlets. Nagle’s journalism seeks to correct this. “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 and Ties That Bind “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 and Mediocre Publisher: Harper Publish Date: September 10, 2024 Pages: 352 Language: English Type: Hardback EAN/UPC: 9780063112049 Dimensions: 9.0 X 6.0 X 1.1 inches | 17.8 pounds BISAC Categories: History, Politics, Society & Current Affairs, Mystery, Thrillers & Crime
