Introducing: BY THE FIRE WE CARRY (audiobook)

BY THE FIRE WE CARRY, the new book by Rebecca Nagle, is 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. 


 


Learn
more: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/by-the-fire-we-carry-rebecca-nagle


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