Rebecca Nagle

Broschiertes Buch

By the Fire We Carry

The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

Beschreibung

"No part of the judiciary exposes the chasm between American ideals and institutional practice like federal Indian law. In By the Fire We Carry, Nagle, a Cherokee journalist, turns a case most Americans haven’t heard of into a legal thriller." —New York Times Book Review NATIONAL BESTSELLER The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year • NPR 2024 “Books We Loved” Pick • Esquire Best Book of the Year  • Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2024 • Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard First Book Prize An “impeccably researched” (Washington Post) 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. 

Autor

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• Gewicht: 454g
• ISBN-13: 9780063112056
• ISBN-10: 0063112051
• Artikelnr.: 73851739

Rezensionen

'A narrative as propulsive and affecting as it is infuriating'

VANITY FAIR

'Nagle's gripping historical and legal chronicle sheds light on a centuries-long struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and tribal land in Oklahoma'

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

'This richly reported book centres on McGirt v. Oklahoma, a Supreme Court case that, when it was decided, in 2020, reaffirmed Native American sovereignty over large parts of the state... Throughout the book, Nagle places these events in the context of centuries of injustice'

NEW YORKER

'A fascinating book and an important one... She compellingly describes not

only the historical wrongs committed against Indigenous peoples, but also how we can't excuse those wrongs by assuming that they were acceptable to their contemporaries because of some kind of lesser moral standard'

WASHINGTON POST

'Terrific... Nagle writes with sensitivity and empathy for the Native American communities she grew up in and around'

ATLANTIC

'A powerful history....Blending reportage and historical research into a propulsive narrative that reads like a legal thriller....Detailed and impassioned, it's a gripping corrective to the historical record, and not to be missed'

ESQUIRE

'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

'A fiery account as chilling as a legal thriller... By the Fire We Carry is a clear and courageous call for justice'

TIYA MILES, author of All that She Carried