Renaissance Readers: "By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-long Fight for Justice on Native Land" by Rebecca Nagle

Renaissance Readers meet at 10:00 am on the second Tuesday of each month.

This month's book selection is By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle.

Before 2020, American Indian reservations accounted for roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States—far less than the nearly 200 million acres reserved for National Forests. In the founding of this nation, more land was set aside for trees than for Indigenous peoples.

In the 1830s, the Muscogee were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by the U.S. military and promised new territory “for as long as the grass grows and the waters run.” That promise was broken. When Oklahoma was established on Muscogee land, the state claimed the reservation no longer existed.

Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for killing another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His lawyers argued that the crime occurred on reservation territory, and therefore, Oklahoma lacked jurisdiction. The state disagreed. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the tribe, reaffirming the existence of multiple reservations across nearly half of Oklahoma—including the Cherokee Nation.

In By the Fire We Carry, Rebecca Nagle chronicles this landmark legal battle alongside generations of Indigenous resistance. Through historical context and contemporary struggle, she reveals the enduring fight for tribal sovereignty and the deep injustices woven into the fabric of American history.

Any interested reader is invited to join the discussion!