Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and a citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is 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 other publications. (Courtesy photo by Brittany Bendabout)
An author will visit New Mexico’s largest city next week to talk about her new book about a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 2020 which resulted in the biggest restoration of tribal land in the country’s history.
The case started in a surprising place: a murder in 1999, for which a man was sentenced to death.
In the course of appealing his conviction, his defense attorney came up with an argument that because the incident happened on a reservation, the state of Oklahoma did not have the jurisdiction to execute him.
Oklahoma had not recognized the Muscogee Nation’s reservation for more than 100 years, and the question of whether the reservation still existed went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land” delves into why all of that matters, not just for tribes and Indigenous peoples, but for our democracy, said author Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation and a journalist.
She said she’s only been to Albuquerque once and is excited to meet in person with people who she’s only known online.
So far, the tour has been an amazing experience for Nagle, she said, because she has connected with people in person about the book, hearing their thoughts and questions, which is a nice break from the “solitude of the writing experience.”
“I write because I care about what my work does in the world, and the impacts that it has,” Nagle said. “It’s extremely rewarding to be able to see that in-person; we don’t often get that in the age of the internet.”
The tour started in her hometown, Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She went to nearby Tulsa, then along the East Coast, then back to Okmulgee, Oklahoma and Minneapolis.
There were a lot of Native people at the events in Oklahoma, Minneapolis and Washington D.C., Nagle said.
The book answers many questions about the case from tribal citizens in eastern Oklahoma, because the case’s history “is something that we lived just within the past few years,” Nagle said.
“This story is really part of the fabric of our community, so I think people are excited to see that reflected back to them, to maybe learn things they haven’t already known,” Nagle said.
Nagle said what she wants tribal citizens to take away from the book is a little different from non-Native readers, because they already know a lot about what’s in the book. But still, she said, many don’t know much about federal Indian law and the case’s story.
Sadly, non-Native people are still learning the basics about tribes, tribal sovereignty, and how the law works around land and treaty rights, Nagle said.
She hopes the book informs people about those things in a narrative-driven way, “where folks might be learning without realizing how much they’re learning.”
Nagle said she has been reading from two particular chapters which show the book’s emotional arc. One is about the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to what would later become Oklahoma, and the other is about the Supreme Court case outcome.
“That history of that trauma, removal and loss is why this court case, and why this decision over 150 years later matters,” Nagle said. “Because of all that was lost to arrive on this land, and have these treaty rights to this land, is why it matters today.”
Connection to New Mexico
Every tribe’s history is different and unique, Nagle said, and at the same time, colonization and the way the U.S. went about taking Indigenous people’s lands has parallels.
Nagle illustrates the difference between individual and collective rights by using an example involving Santa Clara Pueblo, in what is now northern New Mexico.
The American Civil Liberties Union weighed in against the Pueblo in a federal challenge to its citizenship requirements, which accepted the children of intermarried men but not women.
Nagle used the case to talk about the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is revered for her record on gender while she was on the high court, Nagle said, but her record on tribes and tribal sovereignty was “not great.”
At the time, Ginsberg headed the ACLU’s gender and women’s rights division, Nagle said. The case was pushing for federal intervention to tell the tribe to change its citizenship requirement, and Ginsberg argued the tribe’s citizenship requirement was unjust for its women.
Even if one doesn’t agree with the tribe’s requirements, advocates for tribal sovereignty said at the time, what’s more important is that it gets to decide, rather than the federal government, Nagle said.
While individual rights can be part of tribal sovereignty, it’s really about the rights held collectively by the Indigenous nation, and its relationship with the U.S. federal government, Nagle said.
That includes the rights to self-determination, language, culture, land, natural resources, and self-governance, Nagle said, which get lost, “even in groups that are all about fighting for the marginalized.”
The ACLU can miss the mark when it comes to being supportive and good allies to tribes, because they don’t understand the difference, Nagle said.
Avoiding COVID on tour
COVID-19 is mentioned on four occasions in the book. Nagle said she thinks it would be weird to write about the case, which was decided in 2020, and not mention it.
Nagle said she has had some struggles with Long COVID, including debilitating symptoms, which has made her fearful of catching COVID again.
While on the book tour, Nagle said she wears a mask, carries an air filter, travels with a companion to help her deal with her symptoms.
“I think more people would be wise to be cautious about getting COVID,” Nagle said. “We should all be trying to protect people who are high risk — but even people who aren’t high risk can still develop debilitating symptoms.”
At the tour’s start, Nagle said she was nervous about asking people to mask, because as a society, we’ve gotten out of the habit of masking.
“But so far, everyone has been really generous and really understanding, and happy to put on a mask, so we have asked for people to mask at all of the events so far,” Nagle said. “It hasn’t been a problem. People have been really willing to do it. I feel a lot safer being able to do these public speaking engagements with everybody masked.”