Book Thoughts: By the Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle

11 Dec, 2025

_{I've been trying to take notes on nonfiction books I've read. However, I've noticed that I don't actually have all the time in the world to create the notes as detailed as I want. So in the spirit of, "If I really feel like something is missing, I'll just reread the book and finish this post in the future," here is an incomplete post. Things I wanted to take notes on but didn't are in a bullet point list at the end. Personal commentary marked in darker blue.}

This book was the book club pick for Indigenous heritage month.
It covers a legal battle concerning a murder with disputed jurisdiction between Muscogee tribal land and the state of Oklahoma, which ultimately became a case about reservation rights that made its way up to the Supreme Court. This book does an incredible job of weaving together the past and the present, and giving context to the events that led up to the Trail of Tears. Of the Five Tribes, it spends the most time on Cherokee history, as that is Nagle's nation, and she is descended from Major Ridge, who led a faction of the Cherokee nation that historically signed away their original ancestral land in exchange for land in Oklahoma, under the pressure of the Jackson administration and against the wishes of the larger Cherokee population. This fraudulent treaty was a huge source of inner conflict for Cherokee nation.

The title of the book is a reference to the town council fires of Muscogee nation, which they kept burning through forced removal and are burning still in Oklahoma today.

This book is about 30% citations. And woof. The stuff it covers. I had to put it down a few times because the history was so depressing. But reading about the history of the cases was really interesting.

The quote from this book that will probably stick with me the most:

If the treat of New Echota had not forced Cherokees into concentration camps, perhaps the removal, though inevitable, would have been less violent. Under that logic, the treaty party was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands. Or maybe, like with the Muscogees, the US government would have found some other pretense to round Cherokees up. It’s hard not to ask of history, What if? But laying those questions at the feet of Cherokees, instead of the United States, is asking the victims how best to survive genocide.

List of Thoughts:

1. Indigenous Nation Rights are maybe the one branch where strict textualism actually helps a marginalized population; rather, because the base documents of the treaties so obviously grant Indigenous Nations land and are not (at least in the case of the Five Tribes) overturned by Congress, continuing to disenfranchise these nations requires ignoring the law and making shit up. Ironically, I feel like the spirit of the law regarding treaties and allotment etc. would actually be genocide if we're going by the U.S.'s intentions in making these treaties to begin with. Perhaps that's a pessimistic view that privileges U.S. intentions over Indigenous nations'.
   
   But even when the law is on the side of the marginalized, those in power can also just straight up choose to ignore it. Reminds me a lot of what Trump is doing today. You can do everything right by the rules of the game and still lose just because those who are in control don't need to play by them.

   Face to face with the president, John argued the Supreme Court decision [Worcester v. Georgia] must be upheld, but Jackson refused. The genius of the Founding Fathers, we are told, was creating a system of checks and balances. Unlike the king of England, if the president stepped out of line, Congress or the Supreme Court would rein them in. But when Jackson defied the Supreme Court, nothing happened. The abuse of power went unchecked. John watched the constitutional crisis unfold. The Cherokee question, he wrote, was the greatest “crisis” that had ever been presented to “the American People.” In the end, it would be another time John and his tribe leveraged their mastery of American law, only to learn the law didn’t matter.

   Cherokees’ legal options were limited. They could call on Congress to impeach Jackson or ask the Supreme Court to hold Georgia in contempt, but as John stayed in Washington and met with white allies, none of it felt possible. John McLean, a Supreme Court justice who had fervently sided with Cherokee Nation, told John Ridge there was nothing else the high court could do. Congressional leaders who rallied against the Indian Removal Act advised John that Cherokee Nation was out of options. Even the Christian missionaries who created the school in Cornwall, once the backbone of opposition to removal, advised Chief Ross to sign a treaty. As Elias Boudinot wrote, there was not a “sufficient degree of interest for the welfare of the Aborigines in the United States . . . to save them from oppression.”

2. The sheer ability of news media, elected officials, lawyers, etc. — elites, if you will — to simply make numbers up and exaggerate crime and have that be taken seriously is... well, it leaves me kind of hopeless because media is largely controlled by money and lobbying of corporations and I don't know how we can undo that. Thinking also about how the best way to get a case before the Supreme Court is to have an elite lawyer who runs in their circles to present it.

   The influence of corporate or “big law” at the Supreme Court has dramatically increased since the 1980s as a small cadre of well-paid, elite lawyers represent an oversize portion of the cases the high court even considers. Elite lawyers, like Lisa Blatt, inevitably shape important issues in our democracy, but Blatt says lawyers shouldn’t bring their values or personal beliefs to their practice. As Blatt put it on a 2022 Federalist Society panel, “Law firms should be about making money,” she said. “What does [the rest of] it matter?”

   Media was not Oklahoma’s only trick. Another strategy greatly increases the odds the Supreme Court will hear your case: hiring a Supreme Court insider. On average, the Supreme Court is asked to hear over seven thousand cases each year, but takes only a tiny fraction—sixty-six for its 2021 term. Between 2004 and 2012, a small group of elite lawyers worked on only 1 percent of those petitions, but represented almost half of the cases the court decided to hear.

   Thinking also about Táíwò noting that despite the Ogoni people of Nigeria organizing to bring attention to Shell's ecological destruction of the Niger Delta, nothing happened to Shell and the pollution got even worse afterwards because corporations have a blank check. I do not know what the answer to dismantling these machines are when they seem to be propelled perfectly by greed and their gates are guarded by such people. I know A Third University Is Possible would say that's not true and that there are always gaps in these things. So the problem is about how one can find them and utilize them. That work is beyond me, but I would be interested in knowing what it is. The typical answer of unionizing seems almost silly in a way when the very nature of corporations like Shell is about monetary greed. There's also the possibility that organized workers would not have racial or international rights consciousness and would actively vote to drill in Indigenous lands and the like anyway.

3. Non-violent resistance isn't good enough to achieve true justice by itself. On the other hand, violence has hard limits and a heftier price for failing. One thing Nagle mentions that's really sticking with me:
   "Sometimes I hear the sentiment that if Indigenous nations had only fought harder, colonization would have turned out differently. People who say this don’t know how hard our nations fought. Or that turning away from armed conflict was a matter of survival, not will."
   
   Logistically speaking, settlers were just importing more and more of themselves and had more advanced technology in the realm of killing people, and some tribes allied temporarily with them as their own sovereign decisions. Nagle largely sees the most brutal parts of the (ongoing) genocide as "inevitable" and even uses that word once in her book. I don't necessarily believe that anything is inevitable, but sometimes the gears are locked so tight. I feel this way looking at Palestine today.
   
   The current material situations of Indigenous nations in the USA is one where a war was already lost. Where violence did not present victory. I noticed, in the map of the Five Tribes that were forced to walk the Trail of Tears to present-day Oklahoma, that the Seminole nation, which fought three wars against the USA, including the most deadly of all "American Indian wars," have the tiniest parcel of land in Oklahoma of the five, and by a lot. I am assuming this is because they were the most militant and thus had the greatest losses, but I would be interested in reading more about this.
   
   If my hunch is true, though, it really indicates the price of violence. It hurts to know that there is no perfect answer to surviving a genocide; the nature of ethnic cleansing is that one side has an overwhelming amount of power over the other that is insurmountable without interference from other actors (hence the genocide convention, which has never stopped a single genocide because countries like the US don't care kek). I don't know what to do with this powerlessness. I am not even Indigenous and yet I feel it in terms of even living my daily life. And the fact that I kind of do believe, if I stay alive, I will witness China's final domination over Taiwan. Which, of course, is not ethnic cleansing, but it still is a loss of an identity of people and that group's chance for self-determination.¹
   
   What do you do when you can't win? How can you still hope to reverse the tide in the future, and what are the tools for doing so? There has to be some synergy of non-violent and violent tactics. But fundamentally, when you don't have the firepower, there has to also be help from the outside somewhere. This is what I have realized reading this book, given that multiple instances in the book indicate how highly organized these tribes were.

   With his plan in tow, Henry Dawes headed to Indian Territory. Everywhere the Dawes Commission went, however, the tribes said no. Cherokee Nation refused to meet with them. In front of Dawes, the principal chief of Muscogee Nation asked a crowd of thousands to stand on one side of a public square if they wanted allotment, and on the other side if they didn’t. In unison, the crowd voted allotment down. The Choctaw general council made it illegal for any citizen to agree to cede any portion of Choctaw land. The punishment for the first offense was six to twelve months in jail; for the second offense, it was death. In joint councils, leaders from the Five Tribes condemned allotment, printed several thousand copies of their resolutions, and posted the broadsheets around the Territory.

   When Cherokees found out about the fraudulent treaty, they immediately began organizing against it. They held a meeting at Red Clay and in a month collected 3,352 signatures. In February, they sent a second petition, this time signed by over 14,000 Cherokees—nearly 90 percent of the nation. The petitioners argued that the treaty was fraudulent and could not be legally binding. They warned if Cherokees did leave their ancestral lands under the treaty, it would “be by force.”

   Indigenous people are already and have always been doing the work, but the average person doesn't know squat about these nations. There has to be something that can change this. There has to be a strong coalition with allies, too, somehow. This is also true for how decolonizing nations in Africa got material assistance from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Though that does carry its own risks. But the only way to stop a genocide is for outsiders to ally with the endangered population.
   
   Or, I guess, for the supply chain of the invaders to fall apart, which is what BDS was trying to do for years, to some amount of success.

4. Which reminds me, the role squatters have in divesting Indigenous populations of their land is kind of insane. I thought this in reading that book about Palestine I haven't finished taking notes on, and I'm thinking it again here. The sheer greed of individuals en masse can both save the state the actual labor of military operations while also providing convenient narrative about how violent Indigenous peoples are when they fight back. Again, the mobilization of the spectre of crime is horrendously effective. And then when like a generation goes by, the occupying power can claim they own this place actually because the Indigenous people aren't even living there or taking care of the land anymore. It's fucked up. It's so fucked up.

   The fact that railroads also only increased the presence of squatters is also sad. Like when we celebrate stuff like public transit it's also on the knowledge that it cuts through the most discriminated against communities. Though the same can be said for highways.

5. Indigenous oppression is related to slavery.

   Cherokee leaders had accomplished the impossible: galvanizing the American public to their cause. But it didn’t matter. In this chapter of American history, the silent majority prevailed. On May 26, 1830, the Indian Removal Act passed the House of Representatives by a margin of only 5 votes.

   Most often the histories of Indigenous dispossession and enslavement in the United States are taught separately, but these two systems of oppression needed each other. What we think of as the antebellum or Deep South was built on the land Southern lawmakers fought for and won in the Indian Removal Act. And in 1830, the South had an additional 21 votes in the House, because enslaved people—who of course could not vote—were counted toward Southern states’ representation. Without those 21 votes, the bill would have never passed.

   People say you cannot judge history by today’s standards, but there is no need; it is not possible to judge removal more harshly than the activists of 1830 did. After the bill passed, they argued the “pillars” of democracy would “dissolve” and that God would punish our country for our sins. The United States would no longer be a beacon of democracy in the world and, in words that echo today, one newspaper asked, “With what face can we curse Russia for bathing Warsaw in blood?” One observer warned that the expulsion of Indigenous people from the South would “fix a stain upon the honor of this country, which can never be washed away.”

6. Choosing to die a death of disgrace

   The accusations of corruption and bribery against Major and John Ridge began immediately and persist today. There is no evidence of bribery. The reason for their betrayal is much sadder: it was the only way they thought Cherokees would survive. “John Ridge may not die tomorrow,” John wrote in the third person. “But sooner or later he will have to yield his life as the penalty for signing.” It is one thing to choose a death of honor. It is another to choose a death of disgrace. The Ridges forfeited their lives for the Cherokee cause knowing they would be remembered not for their sacrifice, but for their treason.

   This truly is just an impossible decision presented here. Multiple popular pieces of fiction have tried to express this idea of becoming a traitor to your people for what you perceive as "the greater good," but from what I've heard, none of them have actually been done well. Personally, I feel like "We die together," is most "correct" choice because that's what 90% of the population wanted, but that might just be something I feel because I don't have any actual ties to the idea of lineage, no interest in having children, already having a history of being suicidal, etc. It's hard to grapple with the complexity of the situation and people who make these decisions. And it's tempting to go through the questions of, "What would I do if I were faced with a situation like that?" but as the quote I copied at the beginning of this post says, it's a misdirection to be focusing primarily on the actions of the Ridges rather than the government that created the abusive circumstances for this decision to even arise.

   I think as settlers, the real question that we should be asking ourselves now is how we can possibly show up to stop this from happening again. If genocide requires interference from outside parties, how can we build that force? How do we not just give up after the government ignores court rulings? I can't claim to know. I can't claim to know how to have a sustainable struggle in a way that builds real power that can't simply be ignored. I think this is the real, hardest question that people don't want to confront, so they focus on individual actors rather than the structure that is constraining their actions. And this is also why all those fictional stories about the angsty anti-hero who is actually sacrificing himself for other people by making himself a villain continue to miss the big picture.

   It's very likely that there is no true answer to this. But we have to figure out how to trust and work together with other people and live in real coalitions, and those coalitions need to also include people who are placed in more privileged positions that can come in as secondary forces.

7. Retaliatory Murders

   As a young warrior, Major Ridge had witnessed his attack on illegal white settlers result in the retaliatory deaths of eleven people in Pine Log. The weight of it changed him. Now, as an old man, he watched as his decision to sign the Treaty of New Echota resulted in the deaths of thousands.

   Two weeks after the assassinations, John Ross called another public meeting. Members of the Western Cherokee attended, but their formal government was not represented. The assembled Cherokees voted to reinstate the government of Cherokee Nation from the east, and granted amnesty to all who had murdered Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge, and John Ridge. In an attempt to prevent retaliatory violence, they extended a pardon to other treaty signers, as long as they did not avenge the recent murders. It did not work. The bloodbath nearly turned into civil war. Family members of the treaty party avenged the deaths of their loved ones, spurring even more retaliatory violence.

   I feel like this is also the hard thing about violence that injures other people or takes their lives. Online, when people call for violence, they don't really seem to be thinking about the "and then what?" part of it, or how to budget for/deal with retaliation. (This, of course, could also be because they are people who are primarily tweeting rather than actually engaging in taking up arms.) In this case, I don't really know what would need to be done to heal people and break a pending violence cycle like that. I'm sure it'd have to be culturally specific so it makes sense I don't have an answer, but I mean generally. Something something abolitionism.

8. Indigenous women

   Into the late 1700s, Cherokee towns were built around corn. Each community had a large, central field so no one would go hungry. Houses fanned out from there, where families had their own, smaller gardens. And women, who maintained their family plots and organized the community harvests, owned it all. When hungry soldiers at early colonial forts wanted corn, it was Cherokee women they purchased it from.

   Protesters of the Indian Removal Act started the first national petition drive in the country’s young history. (Before then, most petitions were about things like tariffs, lighthouses, or establishing new postal routes.) In the first national political action organized by women in the United States, 1,500 white women signed their names to memorials protesting the act. (This too was first modeled by Cherokees, where women had organized their own petition drives a decade earlier.) Opposition to removal planted the seeds for many white Northern Christians’ involvement in the abolitionist movement and, in turn, women’s suffrage.*

   Today, other than exceptions carved out by the Violence against Women Act, tribes are prohibited from prosecuting non-Natives who commit crimes on tribal land. This means any non-Native person can enter a reservation and steal a car, murder someone, or just break the speed limit, and the tribe is prohibited from prosecuting them. What followed Oliphant was an explosion of violent crime in Indian country, especially against Native women, children, and two spirit relatives.* Native women are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to experience sexual violence and domestic assault. According to the Department of Justice, four out of five Native women will experience violence in their lifetime. Ninety-seven percent of these women have been the victims of crimes perpetrated by someone who is not Native.

   These stats are really terrible. Also just again tired that popular history written by white people doesn't credit Indigenous ideas of governance and politics for things they copied. The very governing structure of the United States of America from the Haudenosaunee, this other stuff leading to women's suffrage, etc.

9. Summaries of Removal.

Choctaw

The first treaty negotiated under the Indian Removal Act was the Choctaw Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Their exodus began in the fall of 1831. For the majority of Choctaw people, the idea of moving west was horrifying. Unlike the Christian belief system where Heaven was above the clouds and Hell was down below, for Choctaws both were on earth, just west. So when the US government told Choctaw people to move west says Choctaw historian Donna Akers, they were telling them to go to the land of the dead.

Overseen by the US government, the first detachments traveled by road. As they walked through the Mississippi swamps, the water was so deep parents had to hold their children over their heads. A large group of people got lost and fell behind. Choctaws traveling ahead begged the US official in charge to send a search party, but he said no. Eventually a group of Choctaw men went themselves. The lost Choctaws had given up on survival and started singing their death songs. Even the men were incoherent and had to be led out of the swamp “by the hand like you would little children,” says Akers.

Chickasaw

After Chickasaw Nation agreed to removal, they were owed a large sum of money for their homeland. The amount, though, slowly dwindled as the United States charged the tribe for every possible expense related to their expulsion. Chickasaw Nation paid the US government to survey their land, furnish army offices, advertise parcels for sale, and even to supply rations for Chickasaw emigrants who had already died. By financing their own removal, in a small token of grace, Chickasaw Nation traveled under comparatively better conditions than other tribes and saw significantly less death.

The journey to their new home, however, was only the first tribulation. When Chickasaws arrived, they had only what they carried; left behind were their homes, cultivated fields, stored food, and all the infrastructure necessary to survive. Smallpox started circulating through their camps. People arrived too late or were too sick that year to plant much corn and, after a devastating drought, what they managed to get in the ground yielded little. The company contracted to supply food complained that getting to the Chickasaw outpost was too difficult. In desperate letters, Chickasaw leaders pleaded for the promised rations, warning that without them their people would starve.

Seminole

At the time of removal, Seminoles still made decisions on a community level; while some bands agreed to move west, the majority refused. In response, the army started gathering troops in Florida. During the Second Seminole War, Seminole people clung to their homeland by evading capture. They had to move so often that they could no longer plant corn, and survived by eating coontie roots. To track them down, the army purchased bloodhounds. After an embarrassingly large number of military defeats, the US Army resorted to trickery. Multiple times, when Seminole leaders came under a white flag of truce to negotiate peace they were captured and carted off as prisoners of war. It took seven years for the US Army to deport nearly four thousand Seminoles—several hundred were never captured. While the true number is unknown, historians estimate 20 percent of the population died.

Muscogee

While Cherokees were waiting for the decision in Worcester v. Georgia, Muscogee leaders sent a delegation to Washington, led by Opothle Yoholo. They wanted to remain on their homelands, but free from the terror of their Alabama neighbors. Muscogee leaders decided to dissolve their government and become US citizens. Under a treaty signed in March of 1832, the tribe’s territory was divided up and each Muscogee family or citizen was assigned a piece of it. Anyone who wanted could sell their land and go west. Though the council still met, it was stripped of its legal power to negotiate with the federal government; they had little say in what happened next.

Private property was supposed to protect Muscogee citizens from white squatters, but land speculators only saw millions of acres in the hands of people with no legal rights. Speculators tricked Creek citizens into signing over their land, used torture and physical assault to coerce sales, and bribed often starving Muscogee citizens to impersonate their neighbors to draw up fraudulent papers. “If they cannot get it in any other way,” US agents reported at the time, “they take the indian . . . & [choke] him until he gives it up.” “The first thing we knew,” Opothle Yoholo would later write, “the land was sold from under us.” There was no moral low to which the intruders would not stoop; they robbed Creek graves of silver, and the corpses of their teeth to make dentures.

Opothle Yoholo desperately searched for a solution. He tried striking a bargain with the Jackson administration, which even opened an investigation into the rampant fraud and promised restitution. But then, in the spring of 1836, some 3,000 Muscogee citizens staged an open revolt. They killed white settlers, raided farms, and burned down a mail station, steamboats, and other buildings. The secretary of war demanded his general collect Muscogee citizens and send them immediately west of the Mississippi. The majority of the tribe did not participate in the uprising, but that did not matter. It was pretense enough to remove everyone: 2,495 “hostile Creeks” were marched to Montgomery in chains and loaded onto a steamboat. One group running from US forces killed their own children rather than be captured. When the military transported the prisoners of war west, one steamboat split in half and over 300 people drowned. The army ordered the remaining bulk of the tribe, more than 12,000 people, to collection points for their deportation.

So white invaders would not benefit from their cultivation, Muscogees chopped down their fruit orchards. Alabama sheriffs and constables raided the camps and arrested Muscogee citizens on trumped-up claims to steal what few possessions they had left. Leading the first detachment going west, Opothle Yoholo danced and stayed awake the whole night before they left. Each Muscogee town took care to keep their council fire alive through these acts of cruelty. The fires they carried still burn in Oklahoma today.

The roads leading west were rudimentary and routed through swamps. Unable to move their feet, horses and mules died in the mud. Sickness and death increased. “Old men & women & children dropping off,” one army official recorded. To make the tide of death more traumatic, they could not bury their dead; bodies were hastily covered with brush and later eaten by animals. Many people “died absent from their friends” Opothle Yoholo wrote in a letter. “And we are sorry.”

During their long journey, the heat and humidity of August turned into the freezing cold of winter. The temperature dropped to zero. The contractors had told Opothle Yoholo and his people to not weigh down the wagons with too many personal items—including winter clothing. Instead the items would be shipped by boat, but the contractors lost the freight. While Muscogee citizens walked through eight inches of snow, their winter clothes were stranded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Of the 12,648 Muscogee citizens forced to march west that year, 3,500 died.

Cherokee

The Treaty of New Echota opens with a long preamble. In it, the drafters explained that life for Cherokees on the land of their ancestors had become unbearable; to relieve their suffering, removal was necessary. Unlike previous treaties John Ridge had negotiated with the Jackson administration, there was no language requiring approval by the Cherokee people. In exchange for $5 million—plus compensation for property left behind, the cost of removal, and subsistence for one year after—Cherokee Nation would relinquish all of their land east of the Mississippi. The tribe would be granted a delegate in the US House of Representatives, and their new home would never “be included within the territorial limits or jurisdiction of any State” without their consent. To protect the “health” of Cherokees moving west, the treaty stipulated enough physicians, steamboats, and wagons for the journey. While this detail was later removed by the Jackson administration, the original treaty included a provision for those who did not want to go: they would be assigned land and become citizens of the United States.

The most consequential clause of the treaty didn’t stand out at first. It set a deadline. Cherokees, the clause read, “shall remove to their new homes within two years from the ratification of this treaty.”

Two years after the ratification, only 2,000 Cherokees had emigrated. The majority refused. “Not one man in twenty is willing to . . . submit to the terms of the treaty,” one army official wrote. While fighting the treaty in Washington, Ross told his people to stand firm against the treaty, and that the US government would eventually “give up” on enforcing it. Jackson was scheduled to leave the White House in 1837, and Ross was again hopeful a US election might save Cherokee land. Jackson’s vice president, Martin Van Buren, was elected, and told Ross the treaty terms would not change. The last petition Cherokees sent to Washington was signed by nearly every Cherokee man, woman, and child—by over 15,000 people in a nation of 16,000. John Ross hand-delivered it to Congress in the spring of 1838. But as Ross and the Cherokee government scrambled for a political solution, the two-year deadline set by the treaty ran out.

The majority of Cherokee people believed the treaty was still being renegotiated, and that, if successful, they would stay. Earlier that spring they had planted their fields of corn, looking toward the fall harvest. When the deadline set by the treaty arrived, men were out hunting, women were plowing fields, children were visiting friends and relatives. On May 23, 1838, 7,000 US soldiers and militiamen went out into the hills and valleys of Cherokee Nation to round them all up.

Cherokees, startled by bayonets in their gardens or kitchen, were not allowed to collect any possessions for the journey or to find their loved ones. They were forced to cross rivers in their only shoes. When a deaf man did not understand the militiamen’s orders, they shot him. At gunpoint, the militia drove a woman in labor from a remote valley town to the main concentration camp. Even after she gave birth, they would not let her rest. Finally, on a riverbank near the stockade, she lay down and died. Over 15,000 people were herded into the camps. The US Army general in charge of the operation had estimated the roundup would take twenty days. It took twenty-five.

The army was woefully unprepared to feed and house their thousands of captives. The open-air stockades provided no shelter or sanitation—there was not even a place to use the bathroom. At night, militiamen roamed the camps, abducting and assaulting Cherokee women. June and July brought one of the hottest summers in people’s memory, and with the heat came disease. The deaths of Indigenous people from disease throughout history is treated like an unfortunate act of God, instead of a predictable outcome of extreme violence and deprivation. “We should find little astonishment,” a physician at one of the camps wrote, “at finding a high-grade” of illness and death. By fall, Cherokees had buried 2,000 of their fellow citizens. As a newspaper reported at the time, “that is one eighth of the whole number, in less than four months.”

Though under unimaginable duress, the Council continued to meet and decided Cherokees would be safer if they could organize the deportation themselves. The army agreed—in large part because Cherokees had deserted the first four detachments by the hundreds. So those that remained in the camps, the majority of the tribe, migrated under their own supervision. The passive resistance of Cherokee citizens saved untold lives.

To try to stem the tide of disease, the leadership of Cherokee Nation decided to wait for colder months to travel. The hottest summer in memory turned into the coldest winter. While the Cherokee-led detachments saw significantly less loss, the trips were still plagued by death. A woman who gave birth on the journey was found dead the next morning with her baby still in her arms. The white landowner nearby would not let her family bury the body so, by wagon, they carried the corpse. People walked over a thousand miles; the footsteps of thousands left a trench in the earth.

Although the exact number is unknown, one missionary estimated 4,000 people died between the camps and removal—a quarter of the total population. Loss of life at this scale compounds with the children who were never born. Cherokee scholar Russell Thornton argues that the total loss of population, including the sharp decline in birth rates, is closer to 10,000—out of a population of 16,000 people.

10. The removal of the Five Tribes and their current claims to Oklahoma rather than their ancestral lands (barring the factions of Seminoles who evaded capture and continued living in present-day Florida) also remind me that Indigeneity is a political concept that should not require continuous presence on a specific area of land. Though I don't know what the other tribes who occupied Oklahoma thought of the whole Trail of Tears that essentially brought new people to their ancestral lands (though I think they'd already lost the portions that were given to these tribes to the US government), and would be interested to find out.

11. Other things I wanted to take notes on but didn't get to:

• supreme Court rolling back basically everything from civil rights
• rules of evidence / plant media /
• rhetoric and straight up lying about figures (lawyer, dawes, etc.)
• rights held collectively and not individual (ruth)
• taking some away and using that to justify taking more
  
  
• oil future regulation
  
  
• allotment / land run ← This was a huge section
• grafters
• kidnapping of teenagers
  
  
• tribes as enslavers
• siding with confederates and lost land
  
  
• preventing cession
• freedmen rolls / losing land earlier than others
  
  
• longer timeline
• indigenous canary

Maybe future me will finish this. Maybe not.

#books #nonfiction