By the Fire We Carry

Starred review from July 29, 2024
Journalist Nagle reports in her brilliant, kaleidoscopic debut on the legal battles leading up to Sharp v. Murphy, the startling 2020 Supreme Court decision that upheld the terms of a 19th-century treaty granting the Muscogee Nation land for resettlement in Oklahoma. “I wrote this book because I wanted the story of this historic Supreme Court decision to be well documented,” but also “to catalog the cruelty of what brushed aside” in popular discussion of the case, Nagle explains. She interweaves the complex courtroom drama with an empathetic, harrowing recap of the 1999 murder of George Jacobs by Patrick Murphy, the case which revealed that the Muscogee Nation’s reservation had never officially been dissolved. Another strand traces the history of the 19th-century forced removal of Native peoples from the Southeast to Oklahoma, including Nagle’s own ancestor, Cherokee Nation leader Major Ridge, who was among those who signed away the Cherokee homeland and was murdered for the perceived betrayal. This family saga is the most complex and rewarding part of the story; Major Ridge hoped the relocation would save his people’s lives, as President Andrew Jackson (a nefarious presence in Nagle’s story) had threatened to chase them “into the sea.” Nagle’s narrative is lucid and moving, especially as she uses archival sources to recreate the mounting terror experienced by Native peoples in the Southeast as violent mobs of outsiders swarmed onto their land. It’s a showstopper.