Cherokee writer and audio journalist Rebecca Nagel’s recently published book “By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land” explores the forced removal of Native people and the Supreme Court case that resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history.
KUNM caught up with Nagle, who is speaking in Santa Fe on Friday on the erasure of Indigenous people in the media.
REBECCA NAGLE: That case started in a surprising place. It actually started as a murder in 1999 and the convicted man was sentenced to death, but over the course of his death penalty appeals, he argued that Oklahoma actually didn't have the jurisdiction to execute him, because the crime occurred on his tribe, Muskogee Nations reservation. The state of Oklahoma said that reservation doesn't exist and hasn't existed for over 100 years. And that question ultimately went all the way to the Supreme Court.
The tribe won, and then subsequently, pretty much the eastern half of Oklahoma was designated as tribal land, and it represents the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history. And so the book tells the story of that case, how it got to the Supreme Court, what happened. And then it also goes back and forth in history and talks about the story of our tribes being removed from our homelands in the Southeast onto land that would later become Oklahoma, and then how Oklahoma was created on top of our treaty territories.
KUNM: What has inspired you to go on this journey of investigating the past between tribal governments and the federal government?
NAGLE: I think that our history has a lot to do with our present. I think some of the patterns of states and the federal government not following tribal sovereignty, not respecting tribal sovereignty, and some of those conflicts, and some of the patterns in those conflicts are very common from the lies that are told about tribal nations, the excuses that are used, the underlying greed that motivates it all. You know, it's sometimes a little shocking how little has changed. And so for me, I think that was an important point to thread, you know, an important needle to thread in the book. And one of the ways I thought I could bring that idea forward was by going back and forth in time.
KUNM: I'm a fellow Indian Affairs reporter as well. So you're just speaking to the choir like I'm very well-versed in what we're talking but you know, when it comes to the average American person, what is something you think they don't know about when it comes to the history of Native Americans in this country?
NAGLE: I don't know, can I just say everything? I mean, pretty much, right? I think people know very little about the history of tribes and tribal nations in this country, and I think a good swath of what they do know is wrong. So when you think about, like, Pocahontas or the first Thanksgiving, or even, like the story of Sacajawea or something, a lot of times those stories are pretty inaccurate. And so, I honestly, I would argue that there is not a public understanding of Native Americans, even on a very surface level that's accurate.
KUNM: And what do you think this is when you're looking at history?
NAGLE: One of the ways that anti-Indigenous racism functions in our country today is through erasure. And so whether it's K-12 education, the news, media, pop culture, when you look there's almost no representation of Native people.
And I think the different versions of the American story, whether it's the version that, you know, our founding fathers were genius and they out of thin air, created the best democracy ever known to man, or they were deeply flawed people, but generations of Americans have, like, taken their vision and perfected it.
In either versions of those stories, Native people don't fit in, you know? You can't have the most perfected democracy being created at the same time that government is committing genocidal acts against Indigenous people, and you also can't have the story of redemption, because we haven't gone back and taken account for those atrocities and reformed our laws and reformed our government to make sure that they don't happen again. And so in my personal opinion, I think that's why Native people continue to get left out, because you'd have to change the entire concept of who we are as this country to fit us in accurately.
KUNM: How does your career in journalism come into play with all of this, how did it start?
NAGLE: So I was writing opinion pieces before I was doing more investigative journalism, and, you know, I was just kind of like putting my toe in the water and feeling it out. And I wrote a couple opinion pieces that had a pretty wide reach, and I saw the impact of my writing. One of those pieces was criticizing Elizabeth Warren for claiming to be Cherokee and actually I saw, like, shift the national conversation. And I was kind of like, oh wow. And seeing that impact of the work, is kind of what lit a fire within me and motivated me to pursue it and keep going.
KUNM: And what do you have in the works right now? Is there going to be more podcasts, possibly another book?
NAGLE: I'm working on another podcast series right now, and potentially another book. It's a collaborative project with some other Indigenous thinkers about how both the legacy of colonization and genocide, but also Indigenous resistance and culture has fundamentally shaped our democracy in ways that aren't recognized.
You can find tickets to Rebecca Nagles talk at the Lensic Performing Arts Center here.
Support for this coverage comes from the Thornburg Foundation.
