Author Talk: Rebecca Nagle

"By the Fire We Carry"

Join author Rebecca Nagle as she discusses her debut book in conversation with Alaynna Littlefeather.

In "By the Fire We Carry", 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. 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. 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. 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. 

Rebecca Nagle is an award winning journalist and citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is the author of "By The Fire We Carry: The Generation-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land" and the writer and host of the podcast This Land. Her writing on Native representation, federal Indian law, and tribal sovereignty has been featured in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, Indian Country Today, and more. Rebecca Nagle is the recipient of the Lukas Book Prize, the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Peabody Nominee, and the Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Award. Nagle lives in Tahlequah, OK. Indigenous communities deserve the same standard of journalism as the rest of the country, but rarely receive it from non-Native media outlets. Nagle‘s journalism seeks to correct this. From the census, to COVID, to the Supreme Court, Nagle focuses on deeply and timely reporting that sheds light on issues of national importance.

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