AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show with the award-winning Cherokee writer and journalist Rebecca Nagle. She’s the author of the new book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land. The book looks at the more than a century-long fight for tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma and what it says about democracy and the American empire.

AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca Nagle also explored the issue in the podcast This Land, which was nominated for a Peabody Award in 2021. Rebecca joins us here in New York.

It’s great to have you with us. Lay out the stories that you tell here in the book.

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah. So, the book goes into McGirt v. Oklahoma, which was a Supreme Court decision in 2020 that resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history.

And that case actually started in a surprising place. It started as a murder in 1999, and the man convicted of murder, Patrick Murphy, was sentenced to death by the state of Oklahoma. And his federal public defender came up with a novel legal theory. She said, “You know what? Oklahoma didn’t have jurisdiction to prosecute this man, let alone sentence him to death, because the crime happened on his tribe’s reservation, Muscogee Nation’s reservation.” The state of Oklahoma said, “Well, that reservation, not only does it not exist, it hasn’t existed for over a hundred years.” And that question went all the way to the Supreme Court.

And really, what this case was a test of, the law was clearly on the tribe’s side, and the question was: Would the Supreme Court follow the law, or would it capitulate to the demands of non-Native residents in the state of Oklahoma and say, “Well, that’s what the treaty says, and that’s what Congress says, but we’re not really going to follow it”? And the significance of McGirt, you know, isn’t that the Supreme Court overturned anything or striked anything down, but it was just that the court, when it came to Indigenous rights, followed the law. And sadly, that’s quite rare.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And talk about the Cherokee Nation leader Major Ridge.

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah. So, Major Ridge is my great-great-great-great-grandfather. And he made a controversial decision, along with his son, John Ridge, that impacted the history of our tribe. And so, in the 1830s, the U.S. government had an unrelenting policy of ethnic cleansing saying that all Indigenous nations basically living within the U.S. at that time had to move west of the Mississippi. And the state of Georgia was terrorizing Cherokees on their own land. And my ancestors decided, against the will and the government of Cherokee people, that the best way for Cherokees, as a people and as a nation, to survive was to move west. So they signed our tribe’s removal treaty.

What followed that was the Trail of Tears. So, U.S. militiamen and Army soldiers literally rounded Cherokees up at gunpoint, herded our tribe into open-air stockades, marched people west, and a quarter of the population dies. And so, the book also shares that story to talk about why the contemporary land rights matter, how many generations of sacrifice have led to Supreme Court decisions like this one.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the Trail of Tears, Rebecca? And talk about the story of how it is sanitized and what exactly the 80,000 people that were forced west — what we’re taught in school, if we’re taught anything, and what in fact you unveil and reveal and many Native Americans know.

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah. I mean, it’s a little wild, but historians actually still debate whether or not the U.S. committed genocide. You know, the term at the time didn’t exist; it was coined in 1944 during the Holocaust. The Cherokee word for our removal is ᏗᎨᏥᎢᎢᎸᏍᏔᏅᎢ. It literally means “when they drove us.” It’s the same word that we use to talk about herding animals.

And so, the Army built 25 open-air stockades. And in 25 days, they rounded up 15,000 people and herded them into those open-air stockades. One of the women that was being herded was actually giving birth, and they wouldn’t let her rest. And she eventually just sort of laid down on the ground and died. There was no sanitation or shelter in the stockades. And in a few months, thousands of people had died. People then had to walk west. And, you know, the estimate is that 4,000 people died. There’s a contemporary scholar that says, with the sharp decline in birth rates, the total death toll is probably — or, the total loss of life is probably closer to 10,000. And that’s out of a population of 16,000.

And I think people have this vague notion that, you know, people had to walk a long ways, that a lot of people died, and it was tragic. But I think we don’t have a concept of how violent some of these chapters of our history are, and how we haven’t gone back as a country and said, “OK, we committed genocide. This was wrong. We need to change our laws. We need to make sure that something like this doesn’t ever happen again.” We’ve just moved on and forgotten about it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, it’s a deeply historical book, but if you could talk about how these policies still inform American law today?

REBECCA NAGLE: Absolutely. And so, there’s some great work by a legal scholar named Maggie Blackhawk, and she really lays bare the way that the policies and the power our government gave itself to dispossess Indigenous peoples of our land still governs how we treat people living at the margins of U.S. empire. And so, when our government wanted to ban Muslims from entering our country, separate migrants at the border, detain enemy combatants indefinitely or suspend the international rules of war to fight terror, it used the principles of federal Indian law to do so. And so, a lot of times we treat, you know, Native American history like this distant chapter, and the legal terrain it created as some sort of siloed backwater of American law, but actually it’s foundational.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the title of your book, Rebecca, By the Fire We Carry.

REBECCA NAGLE: Yeah. It’s inspired by a Joy Harjo poem, and the line in the poem is “I keep warm by a fire carried through cruelty.” And one of the things that our Southeastern tribes share is that we had mother towns, and people were connected by our ceremonial fires. And during the Trail of Tears, people brought their fires. And those fires still burn in Oklahoma. And so it’s the literal fire that our tribes have kept all these years, but it is also, you know, the symbolic fire of our continued fight for justice on Native land.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, this is an election year. As we approach, if you could say — as we approach November — what’s at stake for Indigenous people in this election?

REBECCA NAGLE: You know, to me, what is frustrating is I think that Native voters often get left out. You know, we saw election night in 2020, CNN called Native voters in the state of Arizona literally “something else.” We’re not seeing Native people talked about in election coverage, even though we’re key constituencies in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin.

And so, we need political leaders to really pay attention. You know, one of the key issues affecting tribes right now is how criminal jurisdiction works on reservations. And so, tribes are actually prohibited from prosecuting non-Native people who commit crimes on our land — not for all, but for most crimes. And that’s something that Congress and the president could help fix. So, I mean, and that’s just one example of many. And we really need not just politicians, but sort of our media to pay more attention to issues that are important to Native voters.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you for being with us. Welcome to New York, Rebecca Nagle, Cherokee writer, award-winning journalist. Her new book is titled By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land.

That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud and Hana Elias. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude, Dennis McCormick, Matt Ealy, Anna Özbek, Emily Andersen and Buffy Saint Marie Hernandez. To see job openings at Democracy Now!, you can go to democracynow.org. You can get our podcasts, video or audio, wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks for joining us.