“Most often, when states or non-Native people want something that belongs to a tribe, whether it’s gold, oil, land, or power, they get it — even when the law clearly protects the tribe.” — Rebecca Nagle in By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, 2024.

The nation’s highest court is once again back in session with no Indian law cases currently on the docket.

But more than four years after one of the most monumental U.S. Supreme Court decisions in history, an award-winning Native journalist is taking a broad look at the historic McGirt case that led to the reaffirmation of tribal homelands in Oklahoma. In her debut book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, author Rebecca Nagle notes that the landmark victory was more than a century in the making.

“As tribal citizens, we’re so used to that loss and we’re so used to things not going our way,” Nagle, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said at a well-attended reading of her book outside of Washington, D.C., last month.

“People felt all of that at the same time that they felt the victory,” Nagle said of the centuries of genocidal policies, including broken treaties, forced removal and allotment of tribal lands, that preceded the July 2020 ruling.

“For me, that history was why the case mattered,” Nagle continued at the September 16 reading in Takoma Park, Maryland. “And I think that’s why I really wanted to write the book the way that I do.”

Yet as the title of Nagle’s book indicates, the generations-long fight for justice is far from over. Despite the Muscogee (Creek) Nation securing a ruling that has confirmed the continued existence of at least nine tribal reservations, the state of Oklahoma has spent the last four years trying to undermine, weaken and even reverse the decision.

“Oklahoma had a little bit of a temper tantrum, and got really upset,” Nagle said to laughter at the reading.

Call me crazy, but the rules shouldn’t change based on someone’s race.

That’s what Oklahoma looks like under the McGirt ruling. pic.twitter.com/yR5ZZAplJK

— Governor Kevin Stitt (@GovStitt) June 11, 2024

More specifically, one person in Oklahoma seems to have gotten really upset. And it’s someone pretty powerful — Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor who has exploited every avenue possible, from the court of law to the court of public opinion, in hopes of overturning McGirt.

“Call me crazy, but that is weird. That is super weird. That’s un-American,” Stitt said at one of his press conferences at the Oklahoma State Capitol when talking about the legal and political landscape after McGirt.

“You can’t punish someone differently because of their race,” Stitt said on May 24, rehashing a faulty legal argument that he has consistently lost when he has gone to court. “And that’s exactly what’s happening in Oklahoma, in eastern Oklahoma, because of the McGirt ruling.”

But as Nagle points out in her book, Native people being on the right side of the law doesn’t always mean much. The power imbalance helps explain why Stitt, despite being a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is taking his temper tantrum into a new arena by trying to force his own tribe into accepting a motor vehicle agreement without its consent.

“Our compact is the only tribal vehicle tag compact in the state that puts the tribe — not the state — in charge of issuing tags and titles to our citizens,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said of a government-to-government agreement that is due to expire at the end of the year.

“Governor Stitt can’t stand it,” Hoskin said in a video message on September 24.

But it’s not just legal agreements that have been put at risk by Stitt, who is serving his second term as governor of Oklahoma. In researching her book, Nagle said she interviewed a tribal leader who recounted how the state’s highest-ranking executive scuttled a land acquisition for seemingly no reason, even though it would have benefited the state financially.

“That fell through because the governor is petty,” Nagle said at her reading.

Oklahoma is home to the second-largest population of American Indians and Alaska Natives, including the second-largest population of Native children. Still, that didn’t stop Stitt from vetoing a bill that would have protected the right of Native students to wear tribal regalia during graduation ceremonies.

“Every little thing where the current governor can fight tribes, he will,” said Nagle. State lawmakers ended up overriding the veto on the tribal regalia bill, so it became law despite the governor’s objections.

Before publishing her debut book through HarperCollins on September 10, Nagle produced the award-winning podcast This Land. The first season focused on McGirt while the second examined another high-profile Supreme Court case — one that resulted in a narrow victory for tribal rights by affirming the legality of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), ensuring that tribes still have a say over the futures of their youngest citizens.

Incidentally, the state of Oklahoma, through its Republican attorney general, submitted a brief in Haaland v. Brackeen, arguing that ICWA was unconstitutional. The high court’s decision from June 2023 largely rejected that premise, but opponents — namely state governments and non-Natives — say they will continue fighting a law whose goal is to stop tribal children from being taken away from their communities.

“Historians really still debate whether or not what happened to Indigenous people should be qualified or classified as genocide,” Nagle observed in discussing the forced removal on the Trail of Tears and other genocidal actions in the United States. “And it’s something that as a country, you know, we’ve never, we’ve never taken responsibility for.”

“And so one of the arguments I make in the book is that this is a history that we still have a lot of work to do to recognize,” Nagle added.

The Brackeen ruling was from the Supreme Court’s October 2022 term. Tribes lost the other two Indian law cases that were heard during that session, reflecting a long-term trend in which tribal interests are on the losing end of the stick. The losses dealt blows to tribal water rights and tribal sovereign immunity.

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During the October 2023 term that concluded this June, the justices heard just one Indian law case. The outcome in Becerra v. San Carlos Apache Tribe and Becerra v. Northern Arapaho Tribe resulted in a victory for Indian Country on an issue that has gone before the Supreme Court multiple times over the last two decades. Despite winning repeatedly on funding for their self-determination contracts and self-governance compacts, tribes have had to battle to hold the U.S. accountable for its promises.

The court’s current term began on Monday but the justices have not added any Indian law cases to their workload. Petitions are pending in Apache Stronghold v. United States, a high-profile dispute over Oak Flat, a sacred site in Arizona, and San Carlos Apache Tribe v. Arizona, another dispute affecting sacred sites in Arizona. Incidentally, both cases involve the same mining company — Resolution Copper — and whether the federal and state governments are doing enough to protect the religious rights of the San Carlos Apache Tribe.

The two petitions are in the early stages of review by the Supreme Court, so it will take months for the Apache Stronghold, a non-profit based on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and the San Carlos Apache Tribe to learn whether their pleas will be heard by the justices. In both instances, tribal interests were on the losing end of the stick in the federal and state courts.

Amid a seemingly quiet start to the new season at the high court, Nagle cautioned readers not to view Native fights for justice as being about merely one issue. She said tribal matters are more complex.

“I think a lot of times when we frame what Indigenous people lost, we frame it as land,” Nagle said. “But that’s just what White people gained, and what we lost is so much more.”

“You can’t separate that out — land from sovereignty, from culture, from language,” Nagle added. “All those things are intertwined. And when you threaten land or when you threaten sovereignty, you also threaten the health and well-being of our people. You threaten our culture. You threaten our language.”