November 6, 2025, by Jess Peck for Dreamland Books and Yarn 

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Month! And for many book lovers out there, November is also the month we celebrate Nonfiction November! In the spirit of both celebrations, I have the perfect book to share this week. 

“By the Fire We Carry” by Rebecca Nagle is part memoir, part history, and part murder investigation. Nagle threads these pieces together through two court cases that trace the long, unfinished fight over land and sovereignty in Oklahoma. 

One of those cases is McGirt v. Oklahoma, the 2020 Supreme Court decision that affirmed the Muscogee Nation’s reservation still exists. The story began in 1999, when Patrick Murphy, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation, was sentenced to death for the murder of George Jacobs on reservation land. What might have been an ordinary criminal case became a question of sovereignty when Murphy’s lawyers argued that the state of Oklahoma had no authority to prosecute him because the crime occurred within the Nation’s boundaries. That challenge forced the courts — and eventually the Supreme Court — to face a question the federal government had been dodging for more than a century: did the reservation still legally exist? 

To understand what was at stake, Nagle goes back to the beginning. After being forcibly removed from their homelands in what’s now Alabama and Georgia during the Trail of Tears, the Muscogee Nation signed treaties with the United States guaranteeing them land in what is now eastern Oklahoma. For more than a century, the federal and state governments acted as if the 1832 treaty that granted that land no longer applied, slowly building the state of Oklahoma over Muscogee land. The Supreme Court’s ruling in McGirt acknowledged that the treaties made in the 1800s still hold today. They were made in perpetuity, after all. As my twins have recently begun saying to me, “like, no fricken duh.” 

And if all of this wasn’t interesting and page-turny enough (spoiler alert: it is), there’s also Nagle’s own family history — the story of her ancestors, Major Ridge and his son John Ridge, Cherokee leaders who signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. That treaty led to the Trail of Tears and, ultimately, their assassinations a few years later. 

I hope you’ll pick this one up! 

Happy reading, Jess