In the summer of 2017, I was scrolling through Facebook when I saw a post from Muscogee legal scholar Sarah Deer. It was about a court case I had not yet heard of. A man on Oklahoma’s death row was arguing that the state didn’t have jurisdiction to execute him because he was Native and the murder had happened on the Muscogee reservation. Oklahoma argued that reservation no longer existed. The case would ultimately go all the way to the Supreme Court.
The state’s argument was based on a legal framework that took shape in the early years of the 20th century, when Oklahoma became a state. Before that time, Muscogee Nation’s territory spanned what is now Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. In the 1830s, the U.S. military rounded Muscogee people up at gunpoint and forced them into exile halfway across the continent. In a 1829 letter to Muscogee leaders, the recently inaugurated President Andrew Jackson promised that this new home would remain theirs for “as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty.” That promise was not kept. In violation of several treaties, Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, and its new government acted as if all reservations within its borders were abolished. For over a century, the Muscogee reservation was denied. While that might sound like a reservation no longer exists, that’s not what the law says.
I would spend the next seven years reporting on that case and a related one, McGirt v. Oklahoma — first for news articles, then a podcast and eventually my new book By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land. I knew whatever the outcome, these cases would likely determine the reservation status of my tribe, Cherokee Nation, which had also been denied for well over a century. In 2020, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in McGirt. In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld the reservation of Muscogee Nation. Based on that decision, lower courts also affirmed the reservations of eight other tribes, including my own, Cherokee Nation. Taken together, the newly recognized reservations cover 19 million acres, and about half the land in Oklahoma. It represents the largest restoration of tribal land in U.S. history.
I grew up with stories of how my ancestors sacrificed their lives for the sovereignty and land of Cherokee Nation. What I felt in the McGirt victory was the knowledge that the land my family had died for would be recognized as Cherokee land for the first time in over a century. It was a visceral sense of justice. I felt it in my blood. My ancestors made a controversial decision that changed the fate of Cherokee Nation. The way my grandma told the story they were heroes. In writing this book I tested my childhood understanding against the historical record, and, of course, it is more complicated.
By the 1830s, Georgia wanted Cherokee land. After Cherokees refused to go, the state’s leaders decided to terrorize the tribe until they had no choice. Georgia created a special militia that abducted and tortured Cherokee citizens, and even raffled off sections of Cherokee land to white settlers. Driven from their homes, life on Cherokee homelands was becoming unbearable. My great-great-great grandfather, John Ridge, and his father, Major Ridge, both prominent tribal leaders, began thinking about the previously unthinkable: signing away the land of their ancestors in exchange for land out west. Removal, to them, was the only option in which Cherokees, as a people and a nation, would survive. What had changed was not their desire to remain in their homeland; it was their hope. In December of 1836, the Ridges signed their names to the treaty of New Echota. What followed was the Trail of Tears. The U.S. army herded Cherokees into concentration camps and then forced them to walk halfway across the continent. An estimated quarter of the population died. The survivors blamed the Ridges for their loss. For their betrayal, the Ridges were assassinated.
I did the research for my book during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which sometimes made things challenging — and in other cases, made accessing documents easier, thanks to responsive library policies that were implemented across the country. Many archives were not open to the public, but more institutions were becoming willing to digitize primary sources. For example, the records of one Christian group whose missionaries became very involved in Cherokee Nation are housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library. They scanned the handwritten letters and sent them to James Anthony Owen, a University of Georgia history professor I worked with and who transcribed the nearly illegible 19th-century scrawl. The letters included a description of a teenage John Ridge and a firsthand account of the assassination of his cousin and fellow tribal leader Elias Boudinot.
Some of the most powerful moments in the research process came from encountering my family members in their own words through letters, newspaper articles, transcribed speeches, and congressional documents. What surprised me was how consistently and passionately they pleaded their case. For eight years before their deaths, the Ridges’ position on ceding Cherokee land in Georgia did not change. “Did we act in such emergencies as these for our private comfort, we might choose to die here, and bury our bones in the land of our fathers,” they wrote in one letter. “Where white people might desecrate our tombs with the ploughshare of the farmer. But when we think of our children,” they argued, “[we] will, at all hazards, seek freedom in the far regions of the West.” Eventually, unable to convince their countrymen, the Ridges took the desperate measure of signing a treaty against the will and government of the Cherokee people.
The other voices I encountered in the primary documents were the majority of Cherokee citizens who opposed the treaty my ancestors signed. The Cherokee people had voted down a removal treaty — through public meetings and their elected representatives — multiple times. After the treaty was signed, they organized massive petition drives to protest its ratification and enforcement, collecting signatures from nearly every Cherokee man, woman, and child. By circumventing democracy, they argued, the treaty denied “Cherokees the right to think for themselves.”. The Cherokee people, they wrote, should decide their own fate. Eventually, I came to believe that my ancestors made the wrong choice for the right reason. They were motivated by protecting the future existence of our tribe, but wrong to go around the will and government of the Cherokee people.
My book also covers what happened to our tribes after their removal to Oklahoma. Despite the promises that had been made, the state of Oklahoma was created on top of our treaty territories in 1907. Statehood was the culmination of a process known as allotment. In the late 1800s, communally-owned tribal land was divided up and assigned to individual tribal citizens. Ownership of that allotted land quickly transferred to white hands by sale, swindle, or outright theft. In this way, the U.S. government was able to seize tribal land not through war or by forcing Native people onto shrinking reservations, but rather by pen and paper. The violence of this bureaucratic theft can be harder to see. I thought I could make it most legible through the stories of individual people.
I first came across a central thread in my book while reading an amicus brief from historians that was submitted to the Supreme Court for the McGirt case. The brief mentioned that a Creek woman had been kidnapped in 1922 for her valuable oil estate. James Owen and I dug up the congressional record cited in the brief and found her name: Millie Naharkey. We searched for her name in newspaper records and learned that at the time, her case was quite famous. On the eve of her 18th birthday, Millie was abducted by an oil prospector and his men. They kept her hidden for three months, assaulted her, and tricked her into signing over her land. The Department of the Interior investigated the abduction, and for many decades their findings were sealed. But by the time I filed my request, the records were available. Millie Naharkey’s confidential file included interviews with her abductors, witnesses, her family, and Millie herself. It was hard to read the details of her abduction and assault, but I was grateful to learn about her story from her own words.
From the newspaper coverage, I knew that the abduction and subsequent disputes over her land had resulted in a heap of litigation. I thought I could learn more from the court records. On two big shelves in the Tulsa County Courthouse sit large bound ledgers of every case filed in the county going back to statehood. As I started going through the “N”s of the bound volumes, I was surprised to find mentions of more than 100 other lawsuits I had not known about. I took photographs of the case names, made a giant spreadsheet, and sent that spreadsheet to Tulsa County Court recordkeepers. Some of the court records came to me by email, some were shipped, and others were pulled from the shelves of a large warehouse where I could photograph the paper originals. The lawsuits covered disputes over the ownership of Millie’s land, her family members’ land, and efforts by subsequent owners to have a clean title. I learned that Millie’s hardships lasted long after her abduction was over. First, Millie Naharkey was declared legally incompetent — a common practice in Oklahoma that allowed white people to control Native Americans’ valuable oil estates. For decades, as I learned from Millie’s probate file, she had to ask her legal guardian for permission to buy things like dentures, groceries, Christmas presents, home insurance, car insurance, a coat, a roof, a garbage disposal, curtains, pillowcases, sheets, and towels. By the time I finished my research, I had amassed a few thousand pages of records. It was fitting, given the bureaucratic violence of allotment, that Millie’s story could only be revealed through a mountain of paperwork.
When I started my research, I thought I was documenting the story of a kidnapping. Instead, I found the story of a woman’s life constrained from birth to death by a system set up to take Native people’s land and money.
Before I could find new avenues to explore in this history, I had to absorb the ways other historians and writers put these stories in context. For those interested in this subject, my own research makes for a good reading list. I learned much from I’ve Been Here All the While by Alaina E. Roberts, Fire and the Spirits by Rennard Strickland, and Ties That Bind by Tiya Miles. The three books I relied on most heavily were Michael D. Green’s The Politics of Indian Removal, Thurman Wilkins’ Cherokee Tragedy, and Angie Debo’s classic And Still the Waters Run.
By The Fire We Carry stands within a long tradition of Indigenous intellectual thought, histories, and resistance. By writing our own histories, Indigenous people are writing a more accurate version of the American story. If you want to learn more about the historical periods covered in this book or just Indigenous history more broadly, I recommend reading Native Historians Write Back edited by Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk, Our History is the Future by Nick Estes, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, and the classic Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria.
