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On today’s show, award-winning writer Rebecca Nagle says that the legacy of colonization is a problem not just for Indigenous peoples but a problem for US democracy. In her conversation with host Douglas Haynes, she highlights the tension between the US imagining itself as a democracy versus acting like an empire. The history of Andrew Jackson ignoring the US Constitution is a key example of this, and the subject of her new book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land out now from HarperCollins. In it, Nagle untangles the long history of US Supreme Court cases addressing Indigenous sovereignty and the “unrelenting policy of ethnic cleansing” that drove her ancestors West into what is now Oklahoma. 

Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and a citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is the writer and host of the podcast This Land. Her writing on Native representation, federal Indian law, and tribal sovereignty has been featured in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, USA Today, Indian Country Today, and other publications. She is a Peabody Award nominee and the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Award, and numerous honors from the Native American Journalist Association. Nagle lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

The post Contradictions of US democracy and empire with Rebecca Nagle appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.