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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

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard First Book Prize
Winner of the Oklahoma Historical Society’s E. E. Dale Award
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction
Longlisted for MPIBA’s Reading the West Award for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

“Impeccably researched. . . . A fascinating book and an important one.”—Washington Post

“A brilliant, kaleidoscopic debut. . . . A showstopper.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Rebecca Nagle delivers a compelling work of investigative journalism and American history, weaving together two interconnected stories: the forced removal of Native Americans to treaty lands in the nation’s early years and a murder case in the 1990s that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling affirming Native sovereignty over that land more than a century later.

Before 2020, Native American reservations encompassed approximately 55 million acres in the United States, while nearly 200 million acres were designated as National Forests. From the very founding of the country, more land was set aside for trees than for Indigenous peoples.

In the 1830s, the Muscogee people were forcibly removed from their homelands by the U.S. military and exiled across the continent. They were assured this new land would belong to them “as long as the grass grew and the waters ran.” That promise was soon broken. When Oklahoma was established, the state claimed the Muscogee reservation no longer existed. More than a century later, a Muscogee man was sentenced to death for the murder of another Muscogee citizen on what his attorneys argued was still tribal land. They contended that because the crime occurred on reservation territory, Oklahoma lacked the jurisdiction to sentence him. The state insisted the reservation had ceased to exist. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the case, ultimately reaffirming multiple tribal reservations across nearly half of Oklahoma—including Nagle’s own Cherokee Nation.

With meticulous research and gripping storytelling, Nagle chronicles the long struggle for tribal land rights and self-governance in eastern Oklahoma. By recounting both the contemporary legal battle and centuries of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry offers a crucial and illuminating examination of American history. This powerful narrative reveals the injustices committed against Native communities and the generations of Native-led efforts to reclaim their rights and shape the nation’s future.