Rebecca Nagle discusses "By the Fire We Carry"

Presented by The Seattle Public Library, with suppor from The Seattle Public Library Foundation, The Gary and Connie Kunis Foundation, and promotional partner The Seattle Times.

Accessibility: Masking is encouraged, by request of the author. Assistive listening technology is available in the auditorium. The Library can provide accommodations for people with disabilities at Library events. Please contact LEAP at least seven days before the event to request accommodations.

About the Book:

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 M**der 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 M**der 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.

About the Speaker:
Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning reporter, writer, and citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is the creator and host of Crooked Media’s chart-topping podcast This Land. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, USA Today, Teen Vogue, the Huffington Post, among other outlets. Nagle lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Host or Publisher Seattle City of Literature