Book Review: By The Fire We Carry
“In our self-conception, America is a beacon of democracy for the rest of the world. In reality, our government committed genocide. It has never reformed itself or changed its laws to prevent such atrocities from happening again.”
~Author Rebecca Nagle in By The Fire We Carry, The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
In these times of peril and uncertainty, it is helpful, though not always reassuring, to look to the past for an understanding of how we are where we are. In a few short months, the United States will honor its 250th anniversary. There will be much effort put forth toward a celebration of the many ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence, including equality and the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and happiness. Similarly, the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as founding documents of this government, will be lauded as the bedrocks for a more just society. And yet, here we are. With a country in turmoil and a president who wishes nothing more than to abolish those ideals and tear apart those founding documents into tiny scraps of paper. For those of us who have not experienced persecution by our government before, the last ten years (minus the Biden years) have been shocking. But this is not a new phenomenon. It is actually, in addition to the aforementioned documents, what our country was founded upon.
Critically examining history is crucial to breaking apart the lies and myths we have all been fed through an education system largely biased toward a glorification of the dominant culture. Manifest Destiny. Westward Expansion. Homestead Act. Melting Pot. Civilization. These were all terms repeated throughout my school years. By contrast, Genocide, Removal, Land Theft, and Enslavement as acts committed by the U.S. government were either not mentioned at all or presented only as sidebars to an otherwise remarkable founding of this country. Rebecca Nagle’s book By The Fire We Carry, The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land (HarperCollins 2024) is an impressive work of scholarship that does take an unflinching look at these topics and should be required in all U.S. history classes.
Nagle begins her meticulously researched book with parallel stories unfolding two centuries apart. The first and most recent involves the 1999 murder of George Jacobs near the small town of Vernon in southeast Oklahoma. Jacobs was a person of the Muscogee Tribe as was the man convicted of killing him, Patrick Murphy. The second chronicle begins in the late 18th century with the rapidly changing world of the Cherokee, Muscogee, and other Indigenous Nations in the newly designated state of Georgia. Nagle’s great-great-great grandfather and his father have prominent roles to play in the story as the U.S. government begins a long string of broken promises, cruelty, and murder of the continent’s original inhabitants. She deftly explains these events, past and present, until they merge in the 21st century with historic legal cases brought before the Supreme Court regarding whether the Muscogee Reservation in eastern Oklahoma still exists. If one doesn’t know this history, as I didn’t, then one may be inclined to hold one’s breath, as I was, until the final reveal of the 2020 verdict.
By The Fire We Carry is a riveting legal thriller, but it is also an important work of historical analysis. The central issue of the book, as Nagle explains in the second chapter titled “The Argument,” is about jurisdiction: “In Indian country, only tribes and the federal government have jurisdiction to prosecute Native defendants. States do not.” As the state of Oklahoma sought the death penalty for Patrick Murphy, questions were raised regarding where exactly George Jacobs had been murdered. If it occurred on tribal land, then the state had no authority to prosecute the case. This became not only a question of a man’s life but also of whether or not the Muscogee reservation still existed. And whether or not justice can still prevail in a system repeatedly stacked against anyone outside the power structure.
I took notes on many parts of By The Fire We Carry. One particularly fascinating section involved Nagle explaining the Solem test, named after a 1984 Supreme Court decision, that presented a 3-tiered structure to determine whether or not a reservation still exists. This framework was based on three questions:
Did Congress ever pass a law that disestablished or diminished the reservation?
Did Congress ever intend to disestablish the reservation? Was it widely understood that the reservation was being diminished or extinguished?
How has the land been used? Who lives there now? Is the tribe still there?
Very key in this process is the fact that questions 2 and 3 were only supposed to be investigated if the answer to #1 was ambiguous. If the evidence for disestablishment didn’t exist, then the process was to stop; the reservation in question did still exist. However, as Nagle writes, “But—as often happens in federal Indian law—US courts kept bending the rules, and not to the benefit of tribes.”
Needless to say, our country’s highest court doesn’t always come off very well in this story. When the case in Oklahoma first went to the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch had to recuse himself, so the possibility of an even split could affirm the lower court’s decision, which had decided the reservation existed. Instead of going forth with this circumstance, the Court instead delayed the hearing and waited for a similar case which could decide the same question but would be one where Gorsuch wouldn’t need to recuse himself. Additionally, when the alternate case finally was heard, even liberal judges displayed their ignorance about federal Indian law in frighteningly racist and uninformed ways. Nagle writes, “What is sad about these statements is that Supreme Court justices are no better or worse than the general public; most people don’t know what a federally recognized tribe is, how jurisdiction works on a reservation, or how treaties fit into our Constitution. An entire area of American law—going all the way back to the founding—protects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. But that law is meaningless if the people in charge of interpreting it—and the citizenry that puts them in power—don’t know what it is.”
An uninformed, and often misinformed, citizenry is at the heart of so many problems today. That many of us don’t have an understanding of United States history will continue to be problematic until we confront all that has happened in this country, including the horrific periods of enslavement and genocide and the deep capitalistic greed and misogyny that continue to affect people’s choices in who they vote for and which programs they’ll support. Other things I learned in By The Fire We Carry included how the strategy of allotment broke up reservations, making it easier to swindle, steal, and occasionally buy property from tribal people. There is also the fact of Andrew Jackson ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1832 that upheld tribal sovereignty and explicitly stated that neither states nor non-Native people had rights to tribal land. Within a few years, with a belligerent president and a Congress that supported him, the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation would begin on the Trail of Tears.