The Thanksgiving holiday is rooted in colonial myth-making. While many gatherings this week will be divorced from that mythology, this is nonetheless an important time to center Native histories and struggles. Rebecca Nagle’s new book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, offers a vital resource for such reflection. In this meticulously researched effort, Nagle chronicles a generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma, weaving together a contemporary legal battle — an imprisoned Native man’s fight to avoid the death penalty — with historic wrongs committed against the Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee nations. In a time when the truth of history and of the present are under attack, By the Fire We Carry is an invaluable account of injustice, loss, survival, and reclamation. I recently spoke with Nagle about her book, what Native people will be up against under Donald Trump, and the histories people in the United States must understand if they hope to create a just future.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Kelly Hayes: In the prologue of your book, you wrote, “I wrote this book because I believe the American public needs to understand that the legacy of colonization is not just a problem for Indigenous peoples, but a problem for our democracy.” Can you talk about how the legacy of colonization is a problem for democracy?

Rebecca Nagle: I think it’s twofold. I think that when it comes to Indigenous nations, there is a permissiveness when non-Native people want what belongs to Native peoples, and a weakness when it comes to our government’s will to defend those rights. And so, I think what you see over and over again in U.S. history is that the law is often ignored when it comes to Indigenous nations. Whether those are congressional statutes or treaty rights or Supreme Court precedent, the courts or states and different actors will break and bend the rules, and sometimes even rewrite the rules to fit settlers’ needs and wants.

So often when settlers want something that belongs to a tribe, whether it’s gold, oil, money, power, children, they get it, even when the law clearly protects the tribe. And I think that kind of lawlessness is corrosive in any kind of democracy. And so if we think that our government can be lawless and corrupt when it comes just to Indigenous people and never in any other area, I think we’re all kidding ourselves.

And then I think the other problem is a little bit more foundational. There’s a great legal scholar named Maggie Blackhawk who’s written about this. But when you think about our Constitution and the laws that govern our country, our founding fathers and their supposed wisdom, they wanted a government that would derive its power from the consent of the governed. But they also wanted an empire, and so they built both. A government that at its center, gave citizens a vote and an empire that as it expanded, constantly controlled the lands and the lives of people who had no say. And so while over the generations of American democracy, that center has changed, who is included in that center has changed, the edge of empire never went away.

And so, there have always been people who have lived under the raw power of our government, but not the liberties and the privileges of our constitution, from Indigenous nations, to residents of Guam and Puerto Rico, to migrants detained at our border. And so, I think that our inheritance as U.S. citizens is a democracy that can be wildly anti-democratic and a government that rules both by consent and by conquest.

Kelly: You are meticulous in your description of the Sharp v. Murphy case. Can you talk about the significance of that case and the Supreme Court’s decision?

Rebecca: So the case, which eventually became McGirt v. Oklahoma, because of some complicated maneuverings of the Supreme Court, upheld the reservation of Muscogee Nation. That reservation hadn’t been recognized by the state of Oklahoma for over a hundred years. And based on the Supreme Court’s ruling, lower courts in Oklahoma interpreted it to apply to eight other reservations in the state–which taken together, cover 19 million acres, about half the land in Oklahoma and most of the city of Tulsa. It is an area that is larger than West Virginia and........

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