BY THE FIRE WE CARRY

A Cherokee journalist unpacks the landmark 2020 Supreme Court case that recognized the eastern half of the state of Oklahoma as Indian country.

In 1832, almost 200 years before McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court held in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee nation was a sovereign power. Andrew Jackson ignored it, forcing the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole nations—collectively called the Five Tribes—to leave their ancestral lands in what is now the southeastern United States and go west of the Mississippi to Indian Territory. Nagle gracefully carries readers back and forth through time, explaining the history of the Five Tribes before and after the Trail of Tears, the evolution of U.S. policy toward Native Americans, and the unique peculiarities of Indian law, thornily complex in part because “US courts kept bending the rules, and not to the benefit of tribes.” She is just as careful to elucidate the technicalities of court procedure, helping readers understand how a death-row appeal on jurisdictional grounds led to “the largest restoration of Indigenous land in US history.” The legal arcana are dense, but Nagle’s writing is not. With restrained passion she exposes one injustice after another. Following a recitation of the greed and lawlessness prompted by the discovery of oil on Muscogee land, she observes that the “origin story of the great state of Oklahoma contains a vast criminal conspiracy to rob Native people of their land and money.” Of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, considered the swing vote in the case, Nagle writes: “After everything our ancestors sacrificed, our land was in the hands of this one person—who knew a fraction of our history, if that. The feeling was powerlessness.”

Gripping, infuriating, and illuminating—a valuable corrective to our national ignorance.