"No part of the judiciary exposes the chasm between American ideals and institutional practice like federal Indian law. In By the Fire We Carry, Nagle, a Cherokee journalist, turns a case most Americans haven’t heard of into a legal thriller." —New York Times Book Review NATIONAL BESTSELLER The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year • NPR 2024 “Books We Loved” Pick • Esquire Best Book of the Year • Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2024 • Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard First Book Prize An “impeccably researched” (Washington Post) work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later. Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests—in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.