Before 2020, Native American 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, the U.S. government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples. That changed on July 9, 2020, when a high-profile Supreme Court case―which originated with a small-town murder two decades earlier―affirmed the reservation of Muscogee Nation. The ruling resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history, merely because the Court chose to follow the law.

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 their land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed.

Over a century later, when a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen, his defence attorneys argued the murder occurred on reservation land. This would mean the State of Oklahoma didn't have the jurisdiction to execute him. But, the State still held that the reservation no longer existed. This case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where in 2020 the justices ruled on the side of the Muscogee nation. Their ruling would ultimately affirm the existence of multiple reservations covering half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle's own Cherokee Nation.

Here Rebecca Nagle tells the story of 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.