I first heard of Rebecca Nagle, and heard her voice, years ago when I listened to the award-winning Crooked Media podcast “This Land.” As with too many stories of American colonialism and Native civil rights, what Nagle chronicles in the show began with one man murdering another on tribal land. The case sought to answer who had jurisdiction — the reservation or the state of Oklahoma
The podcast won a Peabody Award among others awards and a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision went in favor of the Muscogee Nation, resulting in the largest restoration of tribal land in United States history.
Nagle, a member of the Cherokee Nation, wasn’t finished. In her impeccably researched book By the Fire We Carry, published earlier this year, Nagle takes readers through whitewashed American stories of Native past, including the “Trail of Tears,” and ties them into the subjugation, misrepresentation and discrimination Indigenous peoples still suffer today.
I spoke with Nagle recently about her book, how it came together, and issues that could impact Indigenous people in the U.S. during a second Donald Trump administration.
Jamil Smith: First things first, I just want to compliment you in one specific respect. That may be the longest, most comprehensive, citation section I’ve ever read at the end of a book. (Ed. note: between the notes, bibliography, and other credits, it’s nearly 100 pages.)
Rebecca Nagle: I’m a little overboard. It was a lot of reading. I can also get a little obsessive about research. (laugh)
No judgment here. I want to skip to the end of your book for that reason. You came to this book with a lot of knowledge. I’m curious to know, as you were reporting and writing: what did you learn?
When it came to the history, I knew it, but I didn’t know the extent of it. Of how desperate my ancestors were when they decided to find the Treaty of New Echota and how many things they tried to do besides that, before they decided that that was the best thing to do in that situation. From their own writing and the history leading up to it, that was something I didn’t understand with depth until I went through the primary sources. I knew the broad outline of the case history from doing the podcast (“This Land”), but I didn’t know a lot of the details about the murder, the families, and even the appeals.
You managed to weave in so much information — not just the legal information, but the stories of the people that you follow. What are the things that you wanted to make sure readers understood about these events, and about Indian country?
When it came to the history and the case, I really wanted to go to the primary sources. I had thousands of pages of stuff to read. But I think the depth of knowledge really helped me figure out what the story was within it, you know? What were the details that I could include that I think gave people a closer sense of not just a cursory knowledge of what happened, but how could I try to place people in the history and in the story of the case? What else do I wish people knew? (laugh)
When we talk about land and Indigenous people, a lot of folks who aren’t Native think about it as real estate. They think about what Native Nations lost as land, and that’s just what White people gained. And what we lost is so much more than that because you can’t separate out land from culture and land from sovereignty and land from language.
Rebecca Nagle
I mean, I think that that’s a hard question with Indigenous issues, right?
Because the starting place for most people in the U.S. is so low. The amount of public understanding and public knowledge we have around federal Indian law or tribal sovereignty, or how reservations work — or even how history informs all those things — in my opinion, is really missing in our public education and in our media environment. I feel strongly that that ignorance is a huge barrier towards Native people having better policy in the U.S.
And so, one of the things that I struggled to do in writing the book was to share a lot of that information and teach a lot of that history — but with people being able to absorb it through the story. I just wish people understood these issues better, both when it comes to law and history.
In your book (particularly in the excerpt published in The Intercept), I see the belief that a system that, in many ways has been designed to oppose us or oppress us, can actually occasionally work for us. I’m curious, especially as folks are down about the election: did that opinion change at all?
Yeah, I think that’s a good question. For me, I feel like where Indigenous nations are left when it comes to law and policy in the U.S. is a really tricky place, in that the laws that we have protecting our land and our ways of life are not enough. We don’t have a Supreme Court case or a constitutional amendment ending our legal subordination, you know? The U.S. still holds our governments and our tribes in the subordinate position, and we still have to fight to be able to exercise our sovereignty within this imperial government. At the same time, there’s a lot that our ancestors fought for and won.
Our tribes still govern areas that are larger than some U.S. states. It’s not all good or all bad. U.S. Supreme Court Justice [Clarence] Thomas once wrote, “Federal Indian policy is, to say the least, schizophrenic.” Putting aside the ableist metaphor, it is an area of the law where there are a lot of contradictions.
I was thinking about the Supreme Court case that resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history, the Muscogee reservation. The other reservations taken together cover 19 million acres, about half the land in Oklahoma — some areas larger than West Virginia — and it hadn’t been recognized as tribal land in more than 100 years. And those types of legal victories aren’t supposed to happen for Indigenous nations in the U.S. right?
I don’t think that the lesson is that, “Oh, okay, well, when the law is on our side and we fight really hard, we win,” because there are plenty of examples where that didn’t happen. But I think that the lesson is that although justice for Indigenous nations is rare in the United States, it is possible.
What did being in Oklahoma mean for you as you were reporting? Did your own relationship to the land change? Your own understanding of it?
I spent a lot of time in the places that are in the book while I was reporting the book. One of the trips that I took that had a really big impact on me was when I went back to where my family lived before removal. Because of White encroachment, they had actually moved a lot. I went to all of those locations and saw their migration out of what is now Tennessee in the mountains into sort of northern Georgia.
I think when we talk about land and Indigenous people, a lot of folks who aren’t Native think about it as real estate. They think about what Native Nations lost as land, and that’s just what White people gained. And what we lost is so much more than that because you can’t separate out land from culture and land from sovereignty and land from language.
A lot of times where you find sovereignty still being exercised, where Indigenous people have held onto and retained land, language is still being spoken and culture still being practiced. And so, it’s deeply connected.
For me personally, when I first heard about the case in 2017, and that was when it was still just about the Muscogee reservation, I felt this visceral sense of justice. I thought of the land that my ancestors had died for could be, through this case, possibly recognized as Cherokee land again for the first time in more than a century. And I think that a lot of tribal citizens in eastern Oklahoma felt the same kind of pull with this case, of knowing how much had been lost for us to have these reservations in eastern Oklahoma and the possibility for them to be recognized again.
What should we, as a broader public who isn’t paying enough attention to what’s happening in Indian country focus on, especially with Donald Trump coming back into office?
There are a lot of calls from across the country for the Biden administration to designate certain sacred sites as national monuments before he leaves office. That’s always a big issue for tribes, protecting sites that hold special meaning in locations where we may no longer have jurisdiction — and sometimes don’t even have access to anymore. The other big issue is how jurisdiction works on reservations. You know, it’s very limited. That’s something that tribes have been trying to improve for decades and have gotten a partial fix through the Violence Against Women Act.
There are some scary things in Project 2025 when it comes to federal contracting with tribes. That, I think, is going to be an issue in the next term. The majority of Indigenous languages that are spoken today are endangered and without more support, they will go extinct. President Biden apologized for boarding schools, but the amount of federal funding for language revitalization is paltry. It’s a competitive grant process that most tribes, which apply, don’t receive. Our tribes are literally being set up to watch our languages die instead of having the meaningful level of support that would ensure their ongoing existence.
I would say for folks who say, “Okay, I wanna know, I wanna pay attention, I wanna be informed,” I just tell them that wherever you get your news, just add Native outlets and Native sources to that news feed — whether it’s Native News Online or ICT News or Native America Calling. Just add that to the buffet of wherever you get your news. Because a lot of times more mainstream outlets aren’t gonna be covering what’s happening with tribes.
Where does your own journalism head from here? Where does your research head from here? And in what directions did this book lead you toward that you might pursue?
The next big project is the collaborative essay series with some other Native writers and historians about how colonialism and genocide, but also Indigenous resistance, have fundamentally shaped our democracy. But I’m also taking some time to kind of reflect and to think about those things.
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